No End of Nightmares in The Use of Acronis True Image Home 2009 To Restore
No End of Nightmares in The Use of Acronis To Restore
I am attempting to restore a bootable Windows Vista Home Premium partition to my hard drive normally referenced as the C: drive.
I have had no problems ever creating (and validating) backups.
But it came time for the software to prove itself in restoring my system.
1. First things first: Acronis True Image Home 2009 (ATIH2009) is UNBELIEVABLY slow just in starting up (initializing). The worst performing Vista configuration does not even begin to come close to taking as much time in booting up and being ready for user interaction. This is an annoyance that has always existed with ATIH2009 on my setup. And this is without any external devices (storage type) connected, so it is not polling those.
2. From inside a new Windows system (usable but not activated), I installed ATHI2009 and tried to get to restore my old system. It does get the "Acronis loader" set up for the system restart, but then after getting the standalone system working, the system says it cannot find backup archive and asks for retry. When I cancel, it halts the system and re-boots back into Windows! The backup is on a USB external spinning disk drive, which is connected just after the Acronis standalone is booting up.
3. As an alternative to getting the restore done, I set up a USB flash drive using the Media Builder, BUT ONLY after I had to get someone's TIB file just to make the USB drive bootable! ATIH2009 cannot even manage that! Anyway, I got rescue/recovery system on the USB drive and it booted the "full version" of ATIH2009 (or so it claims).
But when I try to get the restore operation going, it is able to find the backup, but just after the last step of the wizard, it can no longer find the backup TIB.
And I know why! It is because ATIH2009 is completely unable to manage and keep track of all the mounted disk partitions! And in fact, it made the C: drive unbootable and undetectable as well, requiring a Vista disk to restore bootability.
Here's the situation:
I have FOUR PHYSICAL DRIVES: two spinning disk internal, one spinning disk external connected by USB, and ONE USB flash DRIVE. Total partitions are SEVEN, and the setup is described below, none of which ATIH2009 can seem to manage properly.
1. SEAGATE 100 GB SATA with bootable Windows VistaHP to which the previous VistaHP is to be restored. One NTFS partition (100 GB). Normally Drive C:, volume label = "OS"
2. SEAGATE 100 GB SATA, One NTFS partition (100 GB). Mormally Drive D: volume label = "DATA"
3. Kingston Data Traveler 2.0 GB drive: One FAT16 partition. Contains bootable ATIH2009 recovery system.
4. WESTERN DIGITAL 1 TB (1000 GB) USB-external drive. Has FOUR PARTITIONS:
(i) 800 GB NTFS which contains all Acronis full and incremental backups (.tib files), including a 54 GB partition back up to be restored
(ii) 2 GB linux swap -- not readable under Windows normally
(iii) 27 GB ext3 filesystem using for Ubuntu Linux
(iv) 170 GB ext3 filesystem used by Ubuntu Linux for user files (mounted under /home tree)
Partitions (ii)-(iv) are not readable to Windows, but apparently ATIH2009 in standalone mode can read them.
When the standalone ATIH2009 goes through the restore wizard, I find that it can no longer read Drive C: label "OS" (that's when the currently installed Vista system became unbootable!). Moreover, I have been using it when it also lost track of the partition 4(i) above, where the TIB backup is!
If ATIH2009 cannot properly keep track of the devices, how am I to restore my old Windows system???

- Accedi per poter commentare

Have you downloaded and installed the Safe version of the Rescue CD?
This uses BIOS access and doesn't require any Linux USB drivers which might help in your situation.
I would advise having the external USB drive attached and switched on before the PC is switched on, this will allow the BIOS to recognise the attached drives, which will also help the Acronis Linux CD to find and boot the correct kernel drivers.
Windows of course doesn't understand Linux nodes and ignores them.
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I didnt have access to any USB drives while using the Safe version.
But its a good suggestion! Maybe that will work for mavi gozler, and others.
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There are two other options apart from trying all the command line switches and trying switching the BIOS (if it has the entry) to use legacy rather than AHCI interface, which is to contact Acronis with details of the chipset and types of drives in your machine and see if they can make a special ISO for your machine. Or from your account download the standard ISO version.
This standard ISO will be different to the rescue environment packaged with TI - it uses a different kernel and drivers.
The biggest drawback with having an ISO specially built for your machine, is that you will have to go through the whole rigmarole each time you install a new build or version, and of course if you change hardware, you might have to start all over again.
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Safe version of rescue CD?
My Acronis rescue system was placed on the 4 GB USB flash drive.
If I attempt to boot with two USB bootable devices on---1. the 1 TB drive with the four partitions and having a GRUB loader and 2. The 4 GB USB drive with Acronis rescue system---my BIOS (HP uses Phoenix) does not appear to let me set the boot order for which USB device to boot from, depending on what is plugged in.
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mavi gozler wrote:Safe version of rescue CD?My Acronis rescue system was placed on the 4 GB USB flash drive.
If I attempt to boot with two USB bootable devices on---1. the 1 TB drive with the four partitions and having a GRUB loader and 2. The 4 GB USB drive with Acronis rescue system---my BIOS (HP uses Phoenix) does not appear to let me set the boot order for which USB device to boot from, depending on what is plugged in.
The Safe version can be downloaded from your account page. Register your purchase with Acronis and on the Media ADD Ons tab will be BartPE and the Safe Mode installer.
Why not add the Acronis system to the Grub boot loader? You could have the TI rescue media as an ISO, which Grub can boot and expand from. This is what I do with my pendrive.
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Hi Mavi,
What type of CD-ROM drive is in your computer -- a SATA or IDE CD-ROM drive? I can't get the ATI Recovery CD to fully boot if I put it in my SATA CD-ROM drive, but it boots and works just fine if I put it in my IDE CD-ROM drive. Also, in order for it to see any of my USB drives, USB support for DOS has to be fully Enabled (all -- including USB drives, not just support for USB keyboards and/or USB mice) in my computer's BIOS, and my USB drives have to be connected to my computer when I boot so that the BIOS will "see" them on bootup and before the ATI Recovery CD software starts.
If your CD-ROM is a SATA, try hooking up a CD-ROM drive which has an IDE interface and booting with the ATI Recovery CD in the IDE CD-ROM? Then, hopefully, you will be able to browse all of the drives for your TIB files.
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This is how I solved the problem:
1. The HP notebook has basically two internal (SATA) drives, both 100 GB drives. I think I explained in this thread that I use one for the C:\ ("code" or "OS") partition and the other is the D:\ ("data") drive, which I pretty store all the stuff I generate or which is unique (except for email and such under the C:\users\\AppData tree). So I copied the entire D drive (72.2 GB of files) to a space on the USB 1 TB drive, then quick formatted it.
2. I then copied the TIB files from the USB 1 TB drive to the D drive
3. I started the restore operation in ATI Home 2009, told it the backups were on the built-in D drive, and then the Acronis loader did not have to worry its pretty little head about storage devices connected externally through USB connectors.
The restore was successful.
The back-and-forth copying, deleting, and copying to and from the D drive added a few hours to all of this, but that was minimal compared to the loss of 3-4 days of work.
Of course, software that loads/initializes and sees all the devices and all the partitions BEFORE a restore wizard is run and then loses track of the devices and partitions AT THE END of a restore wizard question completion has to go to the top of The Most Annoying Software Around. There is really no excuse for software whose business it is to be able to sense connections to storage devices of all kinds, since this should be what sets it apart from the rest. Can it be that super secret driver software that defies interface standards is being used in order to annoy developers on the other side of the interface?
I am sure the other solutions offered here might have worked, but I don't have time to methodically test them as I am rather behind in the work I actually do.
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That definitely sounds like one of the same issues I had. I also have an HP Laptop, but mine only has one internal sata hard drive and one internal sata dvd drive. It doesnt have any USB for dos options in the bios. If it did, I would still be using Ghost 2003. 3-4 days work? I spent/wasted over 40 hours of time with this buggy software alone (not counting time waiting for it to finish while I did other stuff and sleeping). I dont think there is any excuse for it. I asked for a refund because it doesnt work with my system, but I havent gotten anything back other than a confirmation e-mail stating they received my request. Its sad that this problem persists even in the most up to date version.
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