Validated backup image fails during recovery
I tried to restore a Windows 10 Pro boot drive from two different backup images and at the end of the restoration a message appeared indicating the recovery was not successful.
After the second attempt failed, I validated the image and re-tried to restore, but it failed again with the same message.
In all three attempts, I tried to restore the Windows 10 Pro boot drive by selecting the option "entire disk" effectively selecting to restore (MBR, Recovery Partition, EFI Partition, Windows Partition).
I am trying to determine why this failure occurred.
George, if your backup includes an EFI System Partition, then as Ian indicated you have a UEFI boot system, and therefore it is essential that you boot from the Acronis Rescue Media using the same UEFI boot mode, as this will ensure that the drive remains using GPT partition format needed for UEFI.
If you have been attempting to recover your Windows OS drive by starting from within Windows, then all I can say is please don't! Create the Acronis Rescue Media and use this for this type of recovery.
KB 63226: Acronis True Image 2020: how to create bootable media
KB 63295: Acronis True Image 2020: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media
First, thanks to both of you Ian and Steve.
My system is UEFI and the partitions that one can see are "Recovery", "EFI", and the partition with the rest of the Windows installation. The disk is defined as GPT and I have the BIOS booting UEFI. I was not trying to boot MBR. In addition, I tried the recovery (in all the attempts) from a UEFI Acronis Rescue Media (USB thumb drive). Perhaps I did not describe well what I meant when I said :
" I tried to restore the Windows 10 Pro boot drive by selecting the option "entire disk" effectively selecting to restore (MBR, Recovery Partition, EFI Partition, Windows Partition). "
When you boot with the Acronis Rescue Media, and you go into the Recovery menu, you can choose whether you want to recover a particular partition or an entire disk. When you select to recover the entire disk, one of the items that is listed as being recovered is the MBR.
I used that method to restore the Windows boot drive on my son's PC that I upgraded a few days ago --- I restored his 256GB SSD drive onto a 500GB M.2 NVMe drive.
I tried the same thing with a backup PC that I have but it failed, as I described in the original post.
I was able to eventually recover the system by re-installing Windows, so effectively allowing it to re-create the "Recovery Partition", the "EFI System Partition" and the "Microsoft Reserved Partition" in addition the Windows Partition, then, using the Acronis Rescue Media I recovered ONLY the Windows partition from the same image that was failing before. But I lost whatever Acronis had installed in the "Recovery Partition".
I find it rather strange and problematic I might add that option to recover the "entire disk" failed all three times I tried basically rendering the recovered disk unbootable every time it failed. And it is even more perplexing since this method had worked in a previous recovery situation.
Just a shot in the dark. Could it be that Acronis did not like that I was trying to recover the entire disk (about 232GB) on a similar size disk (238GB)? The Recovery + EFI + Windows partitions were consuming the first 232GB with another 7GB of unallocated space and the SSD drive a 256GB - whereas in the successful case I went from a 256GB to a 500GB.
Perhaps someone from the Acronis development team can chime in?
George
George, thanks for clarifying your actions.
I used that method to restore the Windows boot drive on my son's PC that I upgraded a few days ago --- I restored his 256GB SSD drive onto a 500GB M.2 NVMe drive.
For the above, was the 256GB SSD a normal SATA drive that you were migrating over to a new 500GB NVMe drive? If so, then that can be problematic, especially if the original SATA drive is retained in the computer.
The recommended method of doing the above is to create a full backup, remove the original drive, then recover the backup to the new drive with only that drive present. This is to avoid the Windows BCD data being written to the original drive instead of the new one.
The same approach applies to when there is more than one internal drive installed.
Hi Steve,
In both cases I used the same method to restore/recover.
In the case of the NVMe drive, I had it as the only drive in addition to the source drive (the drive with the backup image(s)) which was a 2TB WD SATA drive attached via USB, as I wanted to eliminate the performance issue by Acronis Recovery that I had noticed when there were other drives attached (it took a very long time to allow you to pick the target drive/partition).
I did the same thing with the SSD Drive as well. But, the SSD drive was the drive that was the boot drive originally. I did delete all the partitions (Windows RECOVERY Partition, EFI System Partition, Windows Partition) and left it as a drive with 256GB of unallocated space.
Since I am rather curious to determine why recovery of a good backup fails, I will try again (as soon as I get another spare drive). I have plenty of time --- I am a retired software engineer (unfortunately my entire career I worked on mainframes, so I am not extremely familiar with Windows and Unix/Linux).
George, this does seem strange given your steps taken to have only the target drive plus the backup drive present during the recovery.
If you can collect the log for the recovery while still in the offline environment, that may help throw some further light on what is happening or why?
Understand your difficulties in moving from a mainframe background to personal computers - I guess I was fortunate that in my own IBM midrange background I got to also work with PC client software situations and was using the same at work and home. (At least after IBM decided to drop OS/2 and adopt Windows for the desktops!).
George wrote:Perhaps someone from the Acronis development team can chime in?
George, this forum is a community of ATI users. Acronis developers are not on the forum. Occasionally Renata Gubaydullina, ATI| Product manager, posts here, but usually not to answer question.
Maybe you should open a problem ticket with Acronis support.
By the way, as another ex-mainframer, I, too, sympathize with the difficulties of the transition.
Steve,
Thanks for your continued support. I do really appreciate that.
Also, let me take the opportunity to thank Patrick for his comments.
While we went from the green screens, in IBM (that's where I worked for almost 37 years --- I was a lead designer + developer on what is now known as the z/OS Security Server (a.k.a - RACF - Resource Access Control Facility)), to using PC's with PCOMM (Personal Communications) emulators, our daily work was working largely logged-on to TSO. We started on OS/2 and then went to Windows/NT and progressed to Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10.
We all learned how to use Windows and be able to install and customize the various apps (like Notes, PCOMM, Norton AV, etc.), however, most of us old-timers never learned the internals of Windows. All I knew was that the Registry was its most important component, and that Windows was a collaborative-OS, where apps were supposed to play nice. Unlike MVS for instance where system services are protected from apps by running in different "keys", and all system services had recovery built-in so in case of a misbehaving application the whole system did not crash.
Now, back to Acronis TI. I will try the recovery as before and save the log for diagnosis.
George
Hi Steve,
Thanks for pointing out to me the option to save the log.
Yesterday I tried restoring using the option of restoring the entire disk. I did the restore process three times. The first two times I restored the entire disk. The third time I restored only the partition with the Windows code (not the Recovery or the EFI partitions - since I had them restored in the earlier try).
In all three attempts I had the same configuration: I disconnected the two internal SATA HDD's and the internal SATA SSD (256GB Samsung 850 Pro), and the USB connected external HDD's - I only left the two DVD burners connected.
I will describe in detail below the three different restoration attempts (I hope I will not be wasting your time - perhaps this can be useful for other people).
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Attempt 1:
I connected two old WD 500GB drives to the SATA ports - one was the source with a bunch of ATI archives and the other one was the target drive which was unallocated (I had deleted the existing GPT basic partition).
Booted with ATI recovery media (USB stick), selected an ATI archive from the source disk --- this archive was from my son's newly built PC (ASRock B450 Steele Legend Motherboard with 6-Core AMD Ryzen 2600 CPU) --- and selected "restore entire disk".
The restore process was successful and the target drive ended up having these partitions (in sequential/adjacent order):
128 MB Microsoft Reserved Partition
(This is created by ATI when you select to restore the "entire disk" - and it is not visible by Acronis Disk Director --- I have ADD 12.5. It is visible though by AOMEI Partition Assistant --- I have AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional Edition installed and a bootable USB stick for offline environment operations - same as with Acronis Disk Director).
Recovery Partition
EFI System Partition
Windows 10 Pro Partition
After the recovery, I restarted the PC and booted with the Acronis Disk Director 12.5 USB bootable stick and looked at the partitions that had been restored. They were identical to the partitions in the 500GB M.2 NVMe storage device that was backed up with ATI. As I mentioned above, the partitions that were visible with ADD 12.5 were: Recovery, EFI, Win 10 --- in this order.
Then I restarted the PC and booted with the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional Edition bootable USB stick and looked at the restored partitions again. The 128 MB Microsoft Reserved Partition was now visible and it was at the start of the physical disk, followed by the: Recovery Partition , EFI System Partition , Windows 10 Pro Partition
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Attempt 2:
Having succeeded in the first attempt, I took a leap of faith and used the 256GB SSD that was the boot drive for my old spare PC as the target drive for the restore.
As in the first attempt, I connected the source WD 500GB drive to one SATA port, and the 256GB SSD (Samsung 850 Pro) to another SATA port. No other HDD's or SSD's were connected, except the SATA DVD/RW's.
Booted with ATI recovery media (USB stick), selected an ATI archive from the source disk --- this archive was from my son's newly built PC (ASRock B450 Steele Legend Motherboard with 6-Core AMD Ryzen 2600 CPU) --- and selected "restore entire disk". It was the same archive that was used in the first attempt.
I was a bit apprehensive because in the first attempt I had used two identical HDD's, where in this second attempt the target drive was much smaller. I was pleasantly surprised to notice that it really did not matter (since the Windows Partition did not have more data than the space that was available on the 256GB SSD - that is good to know - ATI was able to handle that).
The restore process was successful and the target drive ended up having these partitions (in sequential/adjacent order):
128 MB Microsoft Reserved Partition
(This is created by ATI when you select to restore the "entire disk" - and it is not visible by Acronis Disk Director --- I have ADD 12.5. It is visible though by AOMEI Partition Assistant --- I have AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional Edition installed and a bootable USB stick for offline environment operations - same as with Acronis Disk Director).
Recovery Partition
EFI System Partition
Windows 10 Pro Partition
After the recovery, I restarted the PC and booted with the Acronis Disk Director 12.5 USB bootable stick and looked at the partitions that had been restored. They were identical to the partitions in the 500GB M.2 NVMe storage device that was backed up with ATI. As I mentioned above, the partitions that were visible with ADD 12.5 were: Recovery, EFI, Win 10 --- in this order.
Then I restarted the PC and booted with the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional Edition bootable USB stick and looked at the restored partitions again. The 128 MB Microsoft Reserved Partition was now visible and it was at the start of the physical disk, followed by the: Recovery Partition , EFI System Partition , Windows 10 Pro Partition
Out of curiosity, I re-booted the PC using the restore 256GB SSD as the boot drive, and even though neither the motherboard, nor the CPU were the same as in the source system, the PC booted without any problems. Note that the Source PC was a ASRock B450 Steele Legend Motherboard with 6-Core AMD Ryzen 2600 CPU, and the Target PC was a Gigabyte GA-F2A88X-D3HP Motherboard with a 4-Core AMD Athlon 880K CPU.
What was interesting is that I did not need to use the Universal Restore method to restore to a dissimilar hardware PC.
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Attempt 3:
This time I decided to restore only the Windows 10 partition from the latest archive of my old backup PC (Gigabyte GA-F2A88X-D3HP Motherboard with a 4-Code AMD Athlon 880K CPU), since I had already overwritten its boot drive, the 256GB SSD.
As in the previous steps, the only storage devices (HDD/SSD) that were connected were the source WD 500GB drive with the ATI archives, and the target 256GB SSD.
Booted with ATI recovery media (USB stick), selected an ATI archive from the source disk --- this archive was the latest archive of my old backup PC (Gigabyte GA-F2A88X-D3HP Motherboard with a 4-Core AMD Athlon 880K CPU). This time I chose to recover/restore only the Windows 10 Partition.
During the process of selecting the target drive and partition for the restore/recovery, the task failed - I saved the log and will attach it here. I looked at the log and indicated that it had a problem with locking the disk. So, I re-booted the pc using the Acronis Disk Director bootable USB and looked at the partitions, hoping the disk(s) will get freed (if they were somehow locked by another process --- ENQUEUE/RESERVE and DEQUEUE in Mainframe talk).
Again, booted with ATI recovery media (USB stick), selected an ATI archive from the source disk --- this archive was the latest archive of my old backup PC (Gigabyte GA-F2A88X-D3HP Motherboard with a 4-Core AMD Athlon 880K CPU). Again I chose to recover/restore only the Windows 10 Partition. This time the recovery/restoration succeeded.
After the recovery process was finished, I booted the PC using the 256GB SSD with the restored data as the boot drive.
Everything went great!
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I am attaching (just for reference) the ATI recovery log file from the failed process in Attempt 3
Steve, thanks again for your help and your patience. Please excuse me for my very long post.
George
One final thought.
I am sorry in some way that I was not able to re-create the failure I described in the original post.
As a software developer I felt frustrated when I could not re-create a failure when I was trying to debug a problem that was discovered by my test team or (even worse) by a customer (now that was really bad as the code was already released to the external customers - quite embarassing - luckily it occurred very rarely for me - sigh).
George
Just a shot in the dark. Could it be that Acronis did not like that I was trying to recover the entire disk (about 232GB) on a similar size disk (238GB)? The Recovery + EFI + Windows partitions were consuming the first 232GB with another 7GB of unallocated space and the SSD drive a 256GB - whereas in the successful case I went from a 256GB to a 500GB.
I didn't read the whole post after this so not sure how much was mentioned about this question, but the answer is an absolute yes. A 256GB drive does not have a full 256GB of usable space - usually around 230GB of usable space but it varies from drive to drive as well as sector size of each disk. You could theoretically buy 2 "similar" 256GB drives and one could have more available space than the other - even while they are completely formatted. If free space is tight, then I would definitely look to this as the first problem. In most cases, you want to always leave at least 10% of a disk free to allow for overhead to compensate for size differences in restores, but on top of that, when your OS is running, it needs overhead for things like hibernation files, temp files, Windows updates, other temp files, etc. just for basic functionality.
George,
It sounds to me like your issue was that of the disk being locked that caused the failure. This problem crops up quite often it seems.
To avoid it I have the following steps I follow when I wish to create a backup of a Full OS disk.
- Select the Windows Power option from the Windows flag button, then select Sign out.
- At the logon screen select the power button again and select shutdown.
- Attach ATI Recovery media and boot the PC to that media.
- Select the source OS disk and create a Full backup.
- Shutdown the PC by closing the TI app then at the command prompt typing wpeutil shutdown.
- Remove the original source disk and replace with the new target disk.
- Boot the PC back into the Recovery media.
- Select Recover, select the backup file created in step 4, select the new target disk as recovery location, and proceed with the recovery.
- Once operation is completed, shutdown the PC as outlined above, remove the recover media from the PC, then start the PC. It should boot right up to the new disk.
Following this procedure I have yet to experience a recovery failure or a locked disk issue.
I know this may be off-topic, but can I ask you experienced commenters how are you able to post a comment with a person's quote? I figured out how to create the quote (click on the small rectangular (sort-of) box at the lower right hand corner), but I have not been able to figure out how to add my comments after that.
Sorry for the ignorance.
George
Hi George, not immediately obvious; you click on the little box at right-hand bottom of the post; it then opens in a new post, and you can edit the initial post to remove extraneous text.
Ian
Hi Ian,
I had figured that out, but what I have not been able to figure out how to do is add my own comments like you've done in your post.
George
George wrote:Hi Ian,
I had figured that out, but what I have not been able to figure out how to do is add my own comments like you've done in your post.
George
It is not immediately obvious. On the bottom right hand side of the quote there a red icon appears when you move the cursor over it, and there is a little pop-up saying "insert paragraph here", click on it and you should then be able to add your comment/response. If you want to do multiple comments just do a cut and past leave some space between each, then edit the quote and add your comments. There may be an easier way to do this but I have not yet worked it out.
Ian
will do as Ian has done above and copy the whole text from the selected post.
To add a new section of quoted text, click on the " icon in the toolbar (next to the horseshoe).
then enter your text in the box shown
Clicking in the lower right corner of a block quote shows a red box with the text underneath 'Insert paragraph here'.
(The red box disappeared when I tried to capture an image of it!).
The other method for doing things is to click on the 'Source' icon in the toolbar and then if you are familiar with basic HTML, you can add some extra text in that way.
For example:
<p>This is my new paragraph</p> using HTML paragraph identifiers
Steve Smith wrote:
To add a new section of quoted text, click on the " icon in the toolbar (next to the horseshoe).
Clicking in the lower right corner of a block quote shows a red box with the text underneath 'Insert paragraph here'.
(The red box disappeared when I tried to capture an image of it!).
Thanks to all of you who were willing to put up with my lack of know-how.
Thanks a lot for all your help !!!
George
You can also copy text from a post and then paste it into a reply box using ctrl+v. Then hold down your left mouse button and highlight the text. Now, click the quote icon in menu bar. The highlighted text will become encapsulated in a quote box. You can then comment below the quote box. You can also edit the contents of the quote box if desired.
George wrote:I had figured that out, but what I have not been able to figure out how to do is add my own comments like you've done in your post.
I'll have to give these techniques a try, but I have one that always works.
After doing the quote, click on the Source icon. This will display the unformatted text (including the formatting text). Start typing something after the last formatting text (which will probably be "</blockquote>). Once you have entered anything - just one character is enough - click the Source icon again and you will be back in the formatted display. You previously entered data will be outside the quote box. You can now continue entering stuff.