Acronis 2014 mangles WIn 8.1
I am at my wits end. A month ago Acronis 2011 destroyed my Win7 system so I decide that rather than start over from scratch I might as well build up my base Win8 system. After spending a month transferring data and tweaking today I am unable to restore any Win8 image I made in the past month. Oh the system restores - mostly. But what it does on bootup is completely unusable. It can't find it system profile - the same way Win7 was no longer able to find any data in Documents and Folders rendering it unrestorable. I've used Acronis for many years and it's been mostly competent. We also changed from Ghost to Acronis for our corporate needs back in the '00's. There were problems with that too.
Does anyone know what happens when Acronis creates a system image? I've noticed that it took Win8.1 a very long time to boot after imaging my system. Like the program was doing something that "confused" (for want of a better word) Windows. Luckily I haven't lost any data. I've never kept data on the C: drive. I consider myself very wise in that respect. :-) But I've lost weeks of precious time and it was all going so well - I was starting to like Windows 8.
Any insights from the wizards here would be appreciated.
Cannot comment on your direct issue but I will say that UEFI boot and EFI security has caused many issues with boot, backup, and restore operations. We are hopeful things will get sorted out in the near future. At this point in time with manufacturers being able to implement EFI systems to their own liking with regards to security and satisfying Microsoft, data handling processes across the board have been impacted as procedures for doing so now vary from maker to maker. What is successful on one machine in all likelihood will not be successful on another. There are issues as well as the migration from 32bit to 64 bit systems progresses and even more so on the newer 32bit EFI systems hitting the markets. Just not a great time for users I'm afraid!
Thanks for the post. Nice to learn I'm not going crazy. :-) I was a supporter until now. I've never had strange issues like this with any other Windows OS.
There have been new developments cine I posted this message. After managing to get my oldest image to work I spent a couple of hours reconfiguring windows. I had to leave for a while and left the machine on. When I got back it had somehow rebooted on its own and wouldn't find the boot device. When I restarted I got the same mess login (it's as if Windows forgets it's configured and tries to reconfigure from the start by configuring Store apps! - just like when you first install it - even Firefox needed to be reconfigured) so I turned the machine off. I restored the image again and have not installed any new yet. I now believe Acronis has nothing to do with. It looks like a software conflict. Or maybe it's a hardware conflict. This is not a new system. I'll experiment to see if I can find the problem. Or I'll install Win7 again! :-)
I apologize for wasting forum bandwidth by jumping the gun on this problem.