Salta al contenuto principale

Acronis boot manager F11 password protection

Thread needs solution

I use Acronis True Image 2011 Plus Pak on Windows 7. My question is about password from the Acronis emergency boot manager. This is activated by pressing F11 during system startup. It occurs to me that anyone who powers up my computer currently has access to Acronis powerful tools including delete, restore, and browsing. What is the best way to secure or password protect these functions ?

0 Users found this helpful

About the ASRM, I would not use it. Disable it (regardless of your security concerns). The ASRM won't be of any use if your disk gets seriously corrupted or dies completely. What you need is an Acronis bootable recovery CD that you have tested: you have booted your computer on it and you have successfully restored a couple of files from your backup.

About your security concerns, any bootable medium can be used to boot a computer and many of them include tools much more "dangerous" than Acronis recovery environment, included cracking Windows passwords, etc. If you are only worried about unauthorized access to your data, the only option is to encrypt the folders or disks. Whenever you encrypt your disks, remember ATI is not compatible with disk-level encryption. If you are worried about (un)intentional damage to your data, well, this is why you need to do backups and have some offline storage copies of your backups. Some computers feature a boot-level password, but the compatibility with ATI can be jeopardized.

Thanks for your advice. I have a good Bootable recovery CD that is tested and works. The sytem bios is pasword protected also, however F12 allows the boot menu, which means any bootable CD could be also used. Perhaps I should try to disable it. In that case the CD booting would be re-enabled only when need and authorized.

Sure, you could disable booting from DVD or USB and then lock the BIOS settings with a password. This password will not jeopardize compatibility with Acronis because it stays in the BIOS CMOS memory, not on the disk.

If your computer allows to request a password before booting (not before accessing the BIOS), then it is probably encrypting some sectors of the disk and that could jeopardize compatibility.