Please, please, please, how can I recover my previous backups??
OK, so Acronis Support advised me to reinstall ATI 2021 in order to solve a minor problem where the program was misreporting the amount of space I had left on Acronis Cloud. I did that. But what they didn't tell me was that reinstalling would totally wipe out all my existing backup tasks, with their settings!
Since then it's been chaos all the way. They gave me a complicated procedure to copy the Scipts folder from my former setup, which didn't work because Active Protection was blocking changes, despite having it permanently turned off. I reported that, but have heard nothing from Support since then (couple of weeks ago).
The reinstalled program had found my Cloud replicas and set up backup tasks for those. But I don't backup directly to the Cloud. I do local backups, and then replicate them to the Cloud. So those were no help.
I tried adding an existing backup to recreate the previous task for one of my local backups. I reconfigured the backup task it added, restoring all my settings, and started the backup. But it did NOT do what one would naturally expect, and continue incremental backups of the existing backup file: no, it created a totally new backup in the same folder with the suffix "-0001"!! And of course Replica was not configured, which means I have to create a brand new Cloud replica as well, taking 4 or 5 days to complete.
So, is this really the case? That reinstalling the program wipes out all your existing backups, leaving you no alternative but to recreate them from scratch, plus the Cloud replicas (which in my case will literally take weeks to do)? Does anyone know a way around this? If not, I'm really appalled. I've never come across a major program that doesn't preserve your settings and data when reinstalling or upgrading!
I'll be most grateful for any help anyone can offer.
Thanks!
— Steve.
Steve, thank you, your sympathy is balm to a suffering soul!
So you mean, there's actually a way of exporting your task configuration before reinstalling, and Support just forgot to tell me? Thereby blowing a minor problem up into a major breakdown of my entire backup system?! I've been with Acronis for 17 years now, and I have never been let down so badly. Is there anywhere I can register a complaint, to jog them to improve their advice in situations like this?!
Well, it seems there's nothing for it but to re-do all the backups. Thanks for your advice about replicating (or not!) to the Cloud. I think you tried to tell me this before, but I was in the midst of getting all the replication set up and wasn't quite ready to hear it. But as I'll be redoing it all from scratch now, I'll be happy to use a method that only requires one full backup per task to the Cloud!
One question: Is there any way the new Cloud backup tasks can be set to use the existing data on the Cloud—or will that have to be recreated from scratch?
E.g., I found with one of my old backups, where I'd (accidentally) deleted the Cloud replica, when I added a new task based on that local .tibx file it did do an incremental backup of the existing file rather than starting a new backup from scratch. Would that apply in reverse? I.e. if I delete the local backup leaving the Cloud replica intact, and then set up a backup task based on the Cloud replica, would it accept that as the initial 'full' backup and just do incrementals from then on?
Just trying to salvage whatever I can!
Thanks so much for your advice; much appreciated!
Steve, Acronis introduced the option to export / import backup configuration settings back in ATI 2018, so there is no excuse for the support team to not know about this!
See the ATI 2018 Users Guide: Importing and exporting backup settings or look at the same information in the user guide for any later version!
One question: Is there any way the new Cloud backup tasks can be set to use the existing data on the Cloud—or will that have to be recreated from scratch?
Not to my knowledge! Each backup is unique and the data cannot be mixed. Acronis can / do offer a 'seeding' service where you pay to send them the initial backup image on media for them to load on the Cloud server but this is not something I have ever used or needed.
Thanks for the links about exporting & importing the settings configuration. I'll look into that when I've finished getting all my new backups set up, and export them right away in case of similar future emergencies!
Steve Smith wrote:Acronis can / do offer a 'seeding' service where you pay to send them the initial backup image on media for them to load on the Cloud server but this is not something I have ever used or needed.
Thanks for letting me know. If I lived in Europe or the States I might consider it, but not from out here in South Africa. I wouldn't have confidence the media would actually reach Acronis…
So nothing for it but to bite bullet and set up those new Cloud backups!
Another question I hope you don't mind me asking, arising from my recent efforts to apply Support's procedure for recovering my previous scripts: What's happened to the ability to mount an ATI .tib file and browse the content? I've done that many times in the past, and the recent instructions Support gave me assumed browsing and copying; but I couldn’t find any way to mount the drive: double-clicking the .tib file didn't work, and right-clicking did not provide any 'mount' option. In the end I had to 'add' the file as a new backup task, reconfigure it, and use the Restore option: very cumbersome! I hope there is still a way to mount a backup file as a temporary drive?
Thanks so much again for your help.
Steve, the ability to mount any ATI .tib or .tibx archive file is dependent on the file containing at least one partition to use with the mount operation, hence, it has never been possible to mount any Files & Folders backup archive files.
To browse any .tib or .tibx file is easy - you just need to double-click on the file in Explorer to open the file then navigate as you would any other folder etc.
Note: ATI follows the Explorer view options settings, so if you want to see hidden / system files, you need to enable this in the Explorer view settings 'Show hidden / system files'.
If you still want to try recovering your original Scripts folder .tib.tis files, then the steps needed are:
- Open the main Services control panel (services.mcp)
- Set the Acronis Active Protection service to Disabled start (from Automatic).
- Restart Windows.
- Check that the AAP service shows as being Stopped.
- Copy the .tib.tis files back.
Note: make a copy of any existing files first in case you want to reset back to starting point. - Launch ATI.
I use Powershell to automate the above which you are welcome to use - see the attached zip file with the scripts plus a PDF document with details of how to use.
Steve Smith wrote:To browse any .tib or .tibx file is easy - you just need to double-click on the file in Explorer to open the file then navigate as you would any other folder etc.
Steve, what you say there blows my mind, ’cos that's exactly what I always used to do, and have just tried again now. And on my system it just doesn't work! All my backups are disk backups, not files & folders: the one I'd need to access for my old Scripts folder includes 4 partitions. But when I double click, nothing happens. Absolutely zilch. With more recent earlier versions (2015, 2020?) I could right-click on a .tib or .tibx file and it gave me, I think, an "Archive" option, and when I followed that I eventually reached an option to mount it as a disk. But now even that has gone.
Could this be affected by my version of Windows? I'm still using Windows 7.
(Thanks very much for the procedure to recover the scripts—maybe I can respond to that a bit later…)
Steve, if you cannot double-click on your .tib or .tibx file to open them, then I would recommend doing a Repair Install using an Administrator account to correct the Windows shell integration needed for these actions.
See KB 60915: Acronis True Image: repairing program settings - for details.
Wow, this feels like a massive domino effect event, where every successive difficulty sets off another one, in increasing order of complexity! So when you say "doing a Repair Install", are you talking about Method 3 on that page — "Repair and reinstall"? ("Shell integration" isn't mentioned.) I'm guessing before doing any of that I'd need to export my settings to be on the safe side—which means I'd first have to have the right settings. Which means I should try your method of recovering my Scripts folder first. (I do actually have a copy of my original Scripts folder, which I restored from a previous backup without mounting it…) And before doing that I should export my current backup config in case restoring the original scripts fails! Did I get that right??
Steve, doing a repair install should not touch any of your current task configuration data - it is not the same as doing an uninstall then following this by a new / clean install. The intent is to repair any corrupted application settings etc such as those dealing with integration with the Windows shell components.
By all means, you can use the option to export your current settings to a zip file.
OK, sounds good. So was I right that your "repair install" is Method 3 on the page you referred me to?
Steve, yes - as per method 3 and the further linked KB document this leads to. You should see the Repair option instead of either Upgrade or Install as per the graphic in the document.
It's taken me a while to actually try this, with work stuff intervening. Sorry to say I don't think it worked. Can't be absolutely sure, because the Repair progress bar went almost to the end, then sat there for 2 hours doing nothing. Finally I clicked the cancel button—and it's now been sitting for 1½ hours apparently trying to cancel what it just didn't do!
Is this another of those Acronis things where you have to leave the process running overnight—or for a week—before it finally does anything?
I'm at my wits end now, because being able to double-click and mount the actual backup seems the only way I can restore files from the backup of one of my local external drives, which has just ceased functioning. See my new thread about restoring files from a local external backup…
I've greatly appreciated your help on these forums, but I'm seriously starting to think of changing to a different backup system. It seems I just get hassle from ATI whatever I do; and Support apparently drops a case when they feel it's getting too complicated. You're probably picking up vibes that I'm not too happy with Acronis right now! To be honest, you've been the one factor that's kept me persevering. You've always done all you can to give me solutions, and I've so much appreciated that. But as I say, a time comes when there's just one setback too many; and I may have reached that time. I'll see whether the responses to my other thread (probably yours!) create any new light at the end of the tunnel…
Sorry about the rant—but thanks for listening!
Steve, sorry to read of further woes with attempting to do the repair install - that is both strange and concerning!
Leaving this topic here, I will move to your new 'Restore' topic for now!
Thanks, Steve!
Steve, I just wanted to check how long you think a Repair install should take—to be sure I didn't interrupt it prematurely after 2 hours. To me that seemed more than enough time to finish any kind of installation; but on the other hand a replication can run for days with this program. Do you think it would be worth trying it again and letting it run for at least a full 24 hours? Or should I cut my losses with this, and try one of the solutions you suggested in the other thread (booting from the ATI Rescue media or sending you an Acronis System Report zip file)?
Steve, a repair install should only take a few minutes, not hours! Around the same time as doing a normal install which should be less than 5 minutes!
Booting from rescue media will show whether there is something in Windows that is interfering with any ATI operations?
Sharing the System Report may help to show if there are other issues being reported in the logs etc?
Hey Steve, thanks for your response. I'm afraid the trail of disasters has continued. Today I finally got round to creating bootable media, following your advice in another thread, so I could do as you said and examine my backups after booting from rescue media. I created the 2GB FAT32 partition, used the media builder link you'd given… and when it was done, I discovered I had a boot partition, but it had deleted the partition with all my backups on that drive!
I can only think it happened because at one point I HAD to click on a checkbox agreeing to format the partition and delete all data. There was no option about that: the Continue button remained greyed out till I'd done so. I thought this referred just to the new, 2GB partition, or I would never have continued: but it deleted all data on the disk, apart from the new boot partition.
Included among those backups was the only one I had for my failed external drive. I checked on the cloud for the replica of that backup, found it, but almost immediately it deleted the replica: I suppose because the parent backup could no longer be found. So I have now lost all saved content from that drive. I can only hope that either (1) I can get the physical drive repaired (it's very old, so not too much hope…); or (2), with Minitool, recover the deleted backup partition on my rescue drive. I'm trying to upgrade my subscription to allow that.
Anyway, though the immediate need has now fallen away, I'd still like to be able to double-click or mount other backups to examine their contents and retrieve individual files. To that end I'm following your second suggestion and creating a system report. Here's the Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/x8fh6fggk7u27q5/AADdVuTEs9KWptUdsGUNjB9ya?dl…. Thanks for being willing to have a look at that.
Steve, thanks for the system report zip file but sorry to read of the unexpected format of your external drive and loss of backup files! I hope that you are able to recover the files - please ensure you keep any interaction with the formatted drive to the absolute minimum in the interim other than using any partition recovery tools etc.
In the system report information, there is an immediate factor shown that I wasn't aware of in our dialogue for this & the other topic! That is that you are actually running Windows 7 in a VM running via Parallels on an iMac PC, which is a combination that I have no direct experience of working with!
Next, I see that you have both Avira Protection along with ATI 2021 which brings Acronis Cyber Protection - is the latter turned off within the program settings given that Avira looks to be your active protection method? It has never been recommended to have multiple security providers installed & active!
Steve, some further points to note from the Windows system event log data:
There are regular error entries being reported in the event logs.
Event ID 55: The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume WIN7. Source: Ntfs - going back to 19th Feb 2021
Event ID 24620: Encrypted volume check: Volume information on \\?\Volume{df23eca2-a0ca-11eb-9699-bc9a78563412} cannot be read. Source: BitLocker-Driver
Steve Smith wrote:Steve, thanks for the system report zip file but sorry to read of the unexpected format of your external drive and loss of backup files! I hope that you are able to recover the files - please ensure you keep any interaction with the formatted drive to the absolute minimum in the interim other than using any partition recovery tools etc.
Yes, that did come as a bit of a shock! I did understand you correctly, didn't I, that it should be possible to add a boot partition to a disk that already has backups on it? I hope there wasn't an option to preserve the data that I just didn't see…
Sadly the first time I ran Minitool Partition Wizard on that drive, it listed the deleted partition—but I couldn’t recover it as I didn't have the right version of Minitool. When I'd upgraded it and returned to the drive, the partition was gone. It spent hours searching but was apparently unable to locate it. Now I'm trying to recover the data…
In the system report information, there is an immediate factor shown that I wasn't aware of in our dialogue for this & the other topic! That is that you are actually running Windows 7 in a VM running via Parallels on an iMac PC, which is a combination that I have no direct experience of working with!
Sorry, I think I mentioned this to you in one of our earlier conversations, but obviously I can't expect you to remember that. I should have mentioned it again. I have to say, though, that until now ATI has been working fine in my virtual machine—several years ago I was even able to recover my entire Windows installation after a major crash. I'm holding as long as I can to the assumption that being in a VM doesn't affect the basic functionality of ATI…
Next, I see that you have both Avira Protection along with ATI 2021 which brings Acronis Cyber Protection - is the latter turned off within the program settings given that Avira looks to be your active protection method? It has never been recommended to have multiple security providers installed & active!
Haha, that really annoyed me! I didn't ASK True Image to protect my computer from viruses, etc. It just started without permission! With some difficulty I finally managed to turn it off. But every time I get an update, or change the setup in some way, bang—Cyber Protection is back! I have to keep on turning it off , because as you say Avira is my active protection method and I don't want Acronis or any other program butting in on that.
Steve Smith wrote:Steve, some further points to note from the Windows system event log data:
There are regular error entries being reported in the event logs.
Event ID 55: The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume WIN7. Source: Ntfs - going back to 19th Feb 2021
Event ID 24620: Encrypted volume check: Volume information on \\?\Volume{df23eca2-a0ca-11eb-9699-bc9a78563412} cannot be read. Source: BitLocker-Driver
No, I didn't know about the errors on my primary drive (WIN7, 'C:')! If it's been reporting those repeatedly, somehow the reports are not getting through to me. I'll certainly run Chkdsk on that drive as soon as possible.
The second event you quote (ID 24620) is Greek to me. How do I find out which volume that's referring to? Do I need to know what "BitLocker-Driver" is??
Thanks for passing these things on.
I have to add an excruciating bit of news, though: I've just updated to the latest ATI 2021 version, and guess what? Double-clicking a backup file still doesn't work (just opens ATI), but the right-click menu item has been reinstated—there is now the option to mount the backup! I tested it on an ancient backup, and it works. If ONLY I had got that update a little sooner!!
Steve, sorry that your external drive looks to be something of a lost cause!
This is one further confirmation of why I do not trust the Acronis Survival Kit process as it should make it 500% obvious that any formatting will apply to the whole disk drive and not just to creating a 2GB FAT32 partition on that drive!
I only use the actual Survival Kit process on 'scratch' drives where it doesn't matter if the whole drive is formatted. For my active backup drives, I achieve the same end result by doing the creation of the 2GB FAT32 partition manually using MiniTool Partition Wizard, then allocate a drive letter to that drive before using either the normal Bootable Rescue Media Builder tool or else, my preferred option, using the MVP Custom PE Builder tool to make the 2GB partition into bootable rescue media on the drive.
On the topic of Acronis Cyber Protection, I have had an open support case 04838315 with them since last August to complain that turning this off permanently does not do what is implied, and that it leaves all the background services & processes actively scanning Windows system files and checking for protection updates! As you states, any new updates automatically undoes any changes I have made!
Now to the difficult bit. My understanding of Parallels VM's is that you should be backing these up using the ATI 2021 for Mac application, and not installing the Windows version of ATI within the VM to do this!
See this section of the ATI 2021 for Mac user guide on this subject:
The second event you quote (ID 24620) is Greek to me. How do I find out which volume that's referring to? Do I need to know what "BitLocker-Driver" is??
BitLocker is a Windows encryption tool available in Pro versions of the OS and may or may not be relevant to anything here!
To try to identify the volume (\\?\Volume{df23eca2-a0ca-11eb-9699-bc9a78563412} ) try opening either an Administrator level command prompt or Powershell window, then type in the command: vssadmin List Volumes
You should see a listing that gives these volume identifiers and the associated path.
PS D:\powershell> vssadmin List Volumes
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2013 Microsoft Corp.
Volume path: C:\
Volume name: \\?\Volume{7010e475-358d-40aa-bec7-b265e243134c}\
Volume path: G:\
Volume name: \\?\Volume{20184678-5eaa-4989-aa10-8675d61fff9c}\
Volume path: \\?\Volume{15e07d34-1ebf-4e2a-afc6-f3da7edfb271}\
Volume name: \\?\Volume{15e07d34-1ebf-4e2a-afc6-f3da7edfb271}\
Volume path: D:\
Volume name: \\?\Volume{deea6c64-6f61-4c25-a982-25f9cf2c57e5}\
Volume path: E:\
Volume name: \\?\Volume{b2bcfcbf-f6de-413c-b117-3f8130e8f786}\
Volume path: S:\
Volume name: \\?\Volume{a7fdbf40-0000-0000-0000-100008000000}\
PS D:\powershell>Steve Smith wrote:Steve, sorry that your external drive looks to be something of a lost cause!
This is one further confirmation of why I do not trust the Acronis Survival Kit process as it should make it 500% obvious that any formatting will apply to the whole disk drive and not just to creating a 2GB FAT32 partition on that drive!
I only use the actual Survival Kit process on 'scratch' drives where it doesn't matter if the whole drive is formatted. For my active backup drives, I achieve the same end result by doing the creation of the 2GB FAT32 partition manually using MiniTool Partition Wizard, then allocate a drive letter to that drive before using either the normal Bootable Rescue Media Builder tool or else, my preferred option, using the MVP Custom PE Builder tool to make the 2GB partition into bootable rescue media on the drive.
Well, I'm at a loss then. You described your second method above in another thread, and that's the one I used! Minitool to create the 2 GB FAT32 partition at the beginning of the drive, allocating a drive letter, then using the Bootable Rescue Media Builder tool! So it was the Rescue Media Builder that said it would delete all data and didn't specify that that meant the entire physical disk…
Now to the difficult bit. My understanding of Parallels VM's is that you should be backing these up using the ATI 2021 for Mac application, and not installing the Windows version of ATI within the VM to do this!
See this section of the ATI 2021 for Mac user guide on this subject.
Thanks for looking into the Mac/VM situation as well. I followed your link and read that article, but it seemed to be referring only to backups of the VM itself. I didn't understand everything they said about snapshots, but I've always backed up the Windows 7 VM along with the Mac, as double protection. (I have ATI for Mac as well as the Windows version.) In Parallels the whole of Windows is just a single file on the Mac—so that gets backed up along with everything else.
I opened ATI for Mac and checked there: but there's no way I can choose as source an external HDD attached to Windows. I normally have 3 of these, but none of them appeared as Disks in the Mac ATI source dialogue. So I can't back up my Windows external drives with ATI for Mac; and also, there's no way I could recover individual Windows files or folders from a Mac backup that included my VM. As I said, it's just a single file on the Mac, with no way of accessing its contents unless I restore the entire VM. So it does look to me as though I need both programs.
Thanks for your explanation of the Greek stuff in the Event log data! I'll try and apply that to find out which other drive they were referring to.
One bit of good news is that it's looking likely that our local computer store can recover the data from my failed drive. So not all is lost!
And this time I'll follow your earlier advice about creating parallel backups to the Cloud, rather than replicating the local backups. It absolutely slew me that I still had the backup of that failed disk on the Cloud—but they wiped it out simply because the local version no longer existed! Why do they do that?! Surely the whole idea of making a Cloud replica is that you'll still have that if you lose the local one? I don't understand the reasoning behind that at all.
Anyway, thanks again for your help with all of this. I'm still hoping that one day I'll have a set of backups that works (local and cloud)! And at least now I can mount the backups if I need to recover individual files…
Steve, the only explanation for the format of the drive that I can offer here is that the wrong drive letter was picked when using the media builder tool? I have used this manual method multiple times without any issues but am also probably over cautious about double-checking that the right drive letter is being used!
Glad that you have help locally that may be able to recover your failing drive data - that is good news!
On the files topic, I run a number of VMware Virtual Machines that I use for testing different scenarios etc, and I tend to use a cloud drive such as OneDrive for any files being used so that they get mirrored to my main system and others on the network too.
A second method I use is via my Synology NAS where I also use the Synology Drive Client to share files between my systems and the master copy on the NAS, which is great for when the size of data is larger than my OneDrive allocation.
I always make separate backups of my systems to the NAS along with to external and internal drives for best protection coverage.
Hey Steve, sorry for the long delay—work deadlines, etc.
But I wanted to update you on the current situation, since you've gone to a lot of trouble to help me find solutions.
Steve, the only explanation for the format of the drive that I can offer here is that the wrong drive letter was picked when using the media builder tool? I have used this manual method multiple times without any issues but am also probably over cautious about double-checking that the right drive letter is being used!
OK, if you remember I used the Media Builder and then found that in addition to creating the new FAT32 boot partition, it had erased the other partition with all my backups. I've now (finally) recreated my backup partition on that disk, and went again to the Bootable Media Builder to see if I could successfully add a boot partition this time. But if you look at the attached file you'll see the screen I reached—which was exactly the same as last time: The checkbox labelled "Format the selected media and permanently delete all data" is NOT checked—and the green "Proceed" button is greyed out. I.e., I could not proceed without deleting all data on the disk. (And the Target media info is correct: my backup disk is WIN_Rescue (E:).)
So did I make an incorrect choice earlier in the process? I took the "Simple" option, not Advanced, ’cos I don't understand all that stuff. This was the only place that option took me.
It therefore looks like I may have to use the Survival Kit option, since I don't have any existing backups yet. I assume that'll reformat whatever media I specify. I hope it uses GPT rather than MBR? The Bootable Media Builder used MBR, which meant I had to convert the drive back to GPT in order to use the whole of it rather than just 2TB.
But otherwise the data on my dying drive has been recovered, so I'm all set to start from scratch again. I'll do parallel local and Cloud backups, so I don't risk losing the latter if I have a local crash.
Thanks so much for your help and encouragement through this extended saga!
— Steve.
Steve, in order to use the normal Acronis Bootable Rescue Media Builder tool to create media on an external drive such as a HDD you first need to manually create a 2GB FAT32 partition at the start of the drive and allocate a Windows drive letter to that partition. The tool will not create this partition for you hence why it formatted the whole drive.
The easiest method of creating the 2GB FAT32 partition is by downloading a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software, installing this, then using it to resize the existing partition on the external drive to give the free space needed to create the partition. The wizard can also assign the drive letter to the partition.
OK, you're right, I didn't create the partition first this time. But previously I did—and I ended up at exactly the same screen.
But let me do it properly again, and see what happens when I apply the Media Builder. Thanks for your patience!
Now Minitool gives me no option to create a partition: and there's an initial 128 MB partition called "(Other)" which Windows Disk Management doesn't show. Is this because I changed it to GPT? Do I have to change it back to MBR? If so, does that mean I can never have a 3TB backup drive—only 2TB? And if I change it back to MBR, will that initial 128 MB partition disappear? Or do I just ignore it and shrink the major partition to allow for a new 2GB boot partition—which I guess would then have to be moved to the beginning of the drive?
Sorry to bombard you with questions! It seems new problems just keep bobbing up…
Steve, can you post an image from Minitool showing the partition layout for the external drive please?
No problem: see attached.
Steve, thanks for the image, my own approach would be to delete all existing partitions on Disk 3 (given it shows as 'Used: 0%' for the main partition), then create the 2GB FAT32 partition at the start of the drive, followed by creating an NTFS WIN_Rescue partition using all the remaining space.
The alternative here would be delete the 128MB system reserved partition (not needed on an external drive) then resize the larger partition to create 2GB free space before it.
Finally, allocate a drive letter to the new 2GB FAT32 partition after creating this.
Steve, thanks for the image, my own approach would be to delete all existing partitions on Disk 3 (given it shows as 'Used: 0%' for the main partition), then create the 2GB FAT32 partition at the start of the drive, followed by creating an NTFS WIN_Rescue partition using all the remaining space.
OK, but a single FAT32 partition was what I ended up with last time after the Media Builder had deleted the main backup partition—and then I found I couldn’t create a new partition in that unallocated space! It wouldn't let me, I can't remember the reason given (if any). In my attempt today I had to delete the FAT32 and then convert the disk from MBR to GPT (which I could only do using the CMD line and Diskpart).
Do you think it'll work differently if I start with a totally empty drive?
Steve, I have always been able to do all these operations from within Minitool PW without needing to go to diskpart, so not sure why this would have been necessary for you.
I am making assumptions here that your WD Elements USB external drive is being seen as a removable drive and is connected directly to the computer via a USB port on the motherboard, not via any external dock or hub etc.
The only key difference for me here is that all my external drives are 2TB or less in size - I only have larger drives in my NAS.
Steve, I have always been able to do all these operations from within Minitool PW without needing to go to diskpart, so not sure why this would have been necessary for you.
I actually followed instructions in a Minitool sponsored page (here) which laid out 3 ways of converting MBR to GPT, including Minitool as the first. I tried that, but the option to convert to GPT simply wasn't there. The same was true of the third method using Windows Disk Management. Only the 2nd method using Diskpart worked.
I am making assumptions here that your WD Elements USB external drive is being seen as a removable drive and is connected directly to the computer via a USB port on the motherboard, not via any external dock or hub etc.
Well, there's always something new! I'd never imagined using a USB hub would be a problem. Yes, my drive is a USB external one, but I had it plugged into a hub. I've now plugged it in directly to one of the computer USB ports.
The only key difference for me here is that all my external drives are 2TB or less in size - I only have larger drives in my NAS.
So are you in fact saying that using the Rescue Media Builder or the Survival Kit means I'm limited to the MBR 2GB maximum?
Thanks again for your help!
So are you in fact saying that using the Rescue Media Builder or the Survival Kit means I'm limited to the MBR 2GB maximum?
No to the above - 2GB is only a max for MBR boot systems, not for GPT.
See KB 61639: Acronis True Image: how to create Acronis Survival Kit - for more information on the process.
Also KB 61738: Acronis True Image: Survival Kit disk partition for backups is limited to 2TB on BIOS-booted systems
And Acronis Article: The Acronis Survival Kit
Thanks, Steve. I'll check out the above links.