Place Acronis True Image 2020 on media (Removable media settings)
I Backup to a USB drive and have run the "Rescue Media Builder" tool against that drive. The backup poartition on that drive is formatted as exFAT. I have checked. The drive is bootable and I have been able to restore a file from it. So far so good!
But, the web page describing the backup settings (https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2020/index.html#…) has a statement:
"Acronis True Image 2020 does not support creating bootable media if a flash drive is formatted in NTFS or exFAT. The drive must have a FAT16 or FAT32 file system."
1. That confuses me because the drive IS bootable despite being exFAT.
2. Perhaps it is the other unnamed partition that boots?
3. Do I need to re-run Rescue Media Builder every time I install a Windows update?
4. What is the purpose of the option "Place Acronis True Image 2020 on media "? Why would that even be an option one can turn off?
As you can see, I have a weak understanding of how ATI works!
here is what my disks look like ...
Robert, your disk image shows that the 2GB (FAT32) partition on the exFAT drive is empty.
I would recommend selecting this in disk management, allocating a drive letter to it, i.e. S: then use the normal Acronis Rescue Media Builder to create Simple media using that drive letter S:
Steve Smith wrote:Robert, your disk image shows that the 2GB (FAT32) partition on the exFAT drive is empty.
I would recommend selecting this in disk management, allocating a drive letter to it, i.e. S: then use the normal Acronis Rescue Media Builder to create Simple media using that drive letter S:
Steve Smith wrote:Robert, your disk image shows that the 2GB (FAT32) partition on the exFAT drive is empty.
I would recommend selecting this in disk management, allocating a drive letter to it, i.e. S: then use the normal Acronis Rescue Media Builder to create Simple media using that drive letter S:
I am unable to change drive letter as that selection is grayed out. It will let me chenge the drive letter for C: and D:, which I obviously don't want to do.
Robert, download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software and use that to change the letter for this 2GB partition, plus check it is showing as FAT32.
I ran MiniTool Partition Wizard and it showed that the partition is FAT32 and that it contains 895.32 MB of data:
- BOOTMGR
- BOOTMGR.EFI
- UNATTEND.XML
- ACRONIS.CFG
- a lot of language directories
Although unnamed, I think it best to leave it as it is since I know I can run recovery from it and that's how ACRONIS created it from scratch.
(I like that tool!)
Robert,
You are right not to change the 2GB partition on your disk. I would ask if your disk, which shows as Disk 1 in your screenshot is in fact a USB flash drive?
I am assuming the answer to my question is yes.
With that in mind what you have created on this drive is called a Survival Kit. I am posting a link below for the True Image 2020 pdf user guide. It is in English language. Please review in the guide starting on page 20 the Creating an Acronis Survival Kit section of the guide. This should answer most of your questions about what you have here with respect to Disk 1.
Additionally, creating bootable media on a drive that already contains a Survival Kit will cause the Media Builder tool to attempt to only format the hidden partition of the Survival Kit drive. An excerpt from the user guide on this appears below. I am not sure if this applies to your situation or not but think it might.
- If you decide to create a bootable media on a drive that already has a Survival Kit(p. 20), Acronis Media Builder will attempt to overwrite and update only the hidden partition with the bootable media without formatting the whole drive.
Finally, attributes assigned to the Survival Kit drive are why the hidden FAT32 partition appears to not have any contents.
Thanks for your reply and, yes, you are right about all of it!
I was asking because of the following quote:
- "Acronis True Image 2020 does not support creating bootable media if a flash drive is formatted in NTFS or exFAT. The drive must have a FAT16 or FAT32 file system."
It says that despite the fact tht Acronis DID create a bootable drive even though the visible partition (in this case D:) was (unsupported) exFAT. Unfortunately, the Windows Disk Management tool didn't report things correctly (e.g. saying that the hidden, bootable, partition was empty and not mentioning that it was bootable). So, the above quote is accurate, but does not convey any useful information! It could have mentioned that the Rescue Media Builder will create and populate a bootable partition. That's probably all explained somewhere but that quote is what I saw.
In addition I wasn't sure how much operating system data (in this case Win 10) was part of he survival kit and if it depended on matching the OS (including its updates) to be recovered. It was conceivable that there might be some trouble if the OS got updated without updating the survival kit. My assumption now is that the Survival Kit is independent of the system it may restore so therefore does not need to be refreshed after a Win 10 update.
Robert,
It says that despite the fact tht Acronis DID create a bootable drive even though the visible partition (in this case D:) was (unsupported) exFAT.
The above is in reference to using a smaller capacity (32GB and under) to create a stand alone bootable media. In this scenario the entire drive is formatted as a single FAT32 partition on which the application, boot files, and operating environment are placed.
Unfortunately, the Windows Disk Management tool didn't report things correctly (e.g. saying that the hidden, bootable, partition was empty and not mentioning that it was bootable).
The reason for the above is that the readonly attribute has been set for the bootable partition. This is expected behavior.
In addition I wasn't sure how much operating system data (in this case Win 10) was part of he survival kit and if it depended on matching the OS (including its updates) to be recovered. It was conceivable that there might be some trouble if the OS got updated without updating the survival kit. My assumption now is that the Survival Kit is independent of the system it may restore so therefore does not need to be refreshed after a Win 10 update.
Technically I believe this is correct. Having said that True Image will check the version of the bootable partition whenever the Survival Kit drive is attached and if a version mismatch is detected you will be prompted to update. The application will then attempt to update the bootable partition only which requires that partition be formatted which the application will attempt to do.
I tried this in the 2019 version and it failed. I have not tried in the 2020 version.