Acronis True Image 11 recognizes ONLY 3 Hard Drives

I have a unique system with 5 internal Hard Drives and 3 external USB ones. I am trying to make backups but True Image will only recognize C,D,E drives and 1 External (which happens to be the drive I am backing up to). I have written Acronis with no reply. Any solution?

 

How exactly are your drives set up?

Which are primary and which are logical?

Are any hidden?

Are they all formatted in the same way?

Are any of these in a RAID?

Have you enabled the wonderful Microsoft Dynamic Drive system (TI Home will not work with Dynamic drives).

Are these all S-ata or a mixture of S-ata/IDE or all IDE?

Colin

 

5 internals and 3 usbs? Don't think there's much unique about that. Most folks have smaller numbers of drives but most have internals and USBs. And lots of folks have as many drives.

It shouldn't matter if they are SATA, E-SATA, USB or IDE -- ATI is marketed as working with all of them. However, in truth, Version 11 works with fewer hardware set ups than version 10. If the problem is with the boot disk then, until an update comes out, one needs to file a problem ticket with Tech Support and possibly get a link to an iso file that can be burned that will see all of one's drives. Or one can make a VistaPE boot disk by using Mustang's excellent free guide (search on this forum for it). If the problem is with ATI running under windows, that's a more serious problem where ATI, even when using windows drivers cannot access all drives -- definitely contact Tech Support about that.

 

I'm sorry I wasn't clear. The very first time I used True Image I was able to select all 5 internal Hard Drives as well as 2 external USB drives and make one massive backup to a 3rd USB Hard Drive. I then thought this is stupid to have this massive file. I deleted it and started again. BUT.
When I went to make a backup of my C Drive using the wizard I could only see in True Image the C,D,E, and M(USB backup drive). The other two internal drives do not show in the True Image list of choices.
All my 5 internal drives are NTFS and all are not partioned. I have no RAID drives. My internals are a mix of IDE and SATA.
At present I have made a backup disk of only the C drive. I have made a recovery disk using True Image. Thank you for the help.

 

When viewed in Disk Management, are the missing drives listed as "Type=Basic"

 

The ones I can see in True Image are listed as BASIC but the two I can't see are listed as DYNAMIC. Can you explain?

 

TI Home and Dynamic disks don't play well with each other - the corporate versions will talk to dynmic drives.

The question now is, have you knowingly changed two of your drives to Dynamic?

Colin

 

I was surprised to find out that 3 drives were basic and 2 drives were dynamic. I don't know the difference between the two and I didn't intentionally make 2 drives dynamic.
Can the 2 dynamic drives be changed to basic and what is the difference between the two names?

 

Dynamic is basically Microsoft's name for it's version of setting up a disk so one can do MS's software RAID, compression and a few other things. Disks can be converted from basic to dynamic without losing any data. Not so for going in the other direction, for, as Microsoft says, "Before you change a dynamic disk back to a basic disk, note that all existing volumes must be deleted from the disk before you can convert it back to a basic disk. If you want to keep your data, back up the data, or move your data to another volume."

However, here is this link with steps that will work in a special cases:

http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1806

and here is Microsoft's offical answer on how to do it:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;309044

note that you will need to copy all the data back to the disks once coverted back to basic.

 

Dynamic disk are most likely to be used on server systems. The new Homeserver automatically uses Dynamic disks.

It works by making a partition that basically contains a sort of database of where all the partitions and data live. Normally your two disks will appear in Windows Management as one super large drive - in fact on certain computers (64 bit) this will allow you to have 128 partitions on what appears to be one drive.

Back to your question about reverting Dynamic disks back to Basic Disks.

The Microsoft method will unfortunately delete all your files on the Dynamic volume. Just go into Windows Management, delete the volumes, and and then an option will appear 'convert to basic'

You should be able to use MS Backup to copy the files and stuff onto another conventional drive.

There is another method, that is also listed on these forums somewhere, which requires a disk editor (I think DD10 would work), and you change the boot signature and disk type back to a normal disk. It might be worth searching on the internet to see if this method really does leave all your data intact.

Either way, I'd backup/image whatever you can, before you go down either of the paths.

Colin


See Sheiber gets in before me - my excuse is the cat just threw up (it did really).

 

But did it throw up on your homework? ;-)

 

No on the carpet under my bed, naturally!