Try and Decide won't Continue at reboot

Jerry, it's been a while since I last dabbled with Try & Decide and encountered similar problems where IIRC I had to recover my system to overcome or it may have been restore the MBR & track 0?

In essence T&D looks to use ASRM or something very similar to ASRM to provide the boot options and the Linux OS involved did not play very nicely with my dual-boot laptop, hence I chalked that down to experience and leave T&D well alone!

If you want to use T&D then I would recommend opening a Support Case with Acronis for this issue but have a read of KB 46475: Acronis True Image: Troubleshooting Try&Decide Issues first.

Fortunately, although I couldn't continue in T&D mode I was able to discard the changes. As I said, I tested an innocuous program that wouldn't have caused any problems.

My goal is to test the Windows 10 1803 patch. It has failed to install properly many times, even with the assistance of Microsoft support. Since installation of the patch requires rebooting at least once, I need to be able to stay in T&D until the patch is fully installed. That might not even be possible. I don't know if T&D can capture changes made during a system boot.

I was hoping that T&D would save me from having to rebuild my system after one of these failures.

Jerry, as mentioned above my own experience with T&D has been very limited and not particularly positive.  Personally given your reason for wanting to use T&D I would stick with making a full disk backup prior to any attempt to upgrade to Win 10 1803 and restore back if problems are still encountered.

Not sure why you are seeing problems with upgrading to 1803, all my computers have been upgraded with minimal issues, though I have hit problems with some of the earlier upgrades where I have overcome these by doing an in-place install of the new upgrade as per webpage: Windows 10: Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade

Microsoft tried the in-place upgrade using the ISO file. It didn't fix the problem. Basically, after the system reboot the update stalled at 81%.

This is not the only computer having this problem, nor am I the only one.

I did indeed make a full backup before trying the update. I had to restore it several times during my experimentations.

As I said, I'm not sure T&D could cope with system changes made during a system boot.

Not sure if it is still relevant, but during the ATI 2018 beta testing I tested Try & Decided using various configurations. The results are here. I intend replicating the testing with ATI 2019 beta when I get a chance.

Ian

Relevant? Yes.

Repeatable here? No.

Thanks.

Jerry, "I'm not sure T&D could cope with system changes made during a system boot."

Thinking about this further, T&D modifies the MBR / Boot configuration in order to present the options to Continue or Discard changes, new Windows 10 Updates also modify the Boot configuration too, so there is a real possibility of one trampling over the other here.

Each new Windows 10 Insiders update I get on my dual-boot system automatically modifies my boot configuration to make itself the default OS to boot plus also renames the boot entry to remove my extra details to identify the different OS I can boot from.

I wouldn't be surprised if you are correct. I haven't dared try it with something that monkeys with the boot process, but I suspect that T&D and anything that hijacks the boot process would step all over each other. Your problem with dual boot points to that.

In this particular case, though, I wasn't installing a patch at all. If you look at my original post, I took baby steps. A reboot wasn't needed; it was just an experiment. The help file states

You can leave the Try&Decide turned on as long as you like, because this mode "survives" across reboots of your operating system.

When your computer reboots for whatever reason while working in the Try mode, before booting of the operating system starts, you will be shown a dialog offering you two choices – stop the mode and discard changes or continue working in the mode. This will allow you to discard the changes that have resulted in a system crash. On the other hand, if you reboot, for example, after installing an application, you can continue working in the Try mode after starting Windows.

I was trying to do the latter.

I've just been informed that this is a known problem. You can easily replicate it by turning on T&D and rebooting your machine. You don't have make any changes to your system at all.

The consequences of this problem aren't as ghastly as you might think. If you install something that crashes your system, you can still discard the changes on reboot.