BOOT Issues

I had obscure problems with my recovery when my system disk failed.

When my IBM disk failed I loaded their excellent DFT floppy bootable program to diagnose it.
It said disk broken and second disc (Data disc) fine.

I purchased a new and bigger PATA disc and recovered my latest image from an external USB drive.
Apart from the appalling speed of USB drives working under Recovery Unix (maybe 8 times slower) everything was fine.

However it refused to boot unless the Acronis Unix CD was present.
Presumably this does a mini boot and searches for an O/S to load.

I searched the forums (on another machine) and noted all the tosh about mbrs etc. I tried all this but too no avail.
I did a full rebuild of a clean windows even letting Windies reformat my master disk but to no avail.

I then went into the BIOS and looked at boot sections but all devices IE floppy, then CD, and finally HDD were fine.
There was no anti virus MBR protection present on this board.

Eventually I stumbled on the bleeding obvious.
I ran the excellent IBM DFT test program from floppy when I diagnosed the original failure.
I ran it again after putting in the new disk. All was fine.

I then reasoned that when the disk dived and I ran DFT it would have seen my Data disc as the only one and raised its priority.

Low and behold this had happened my data disk was now 0 and the system disk 1 and hence no boot.

I could move these in the BIOS without unplugging the data disk.

Low and behold it now booted.

There are many posts on this forum covering boot issues!

I wonder how many would be solved by this simple step.
Priorities must get changed if you remove or plug in devices.

It is all too obvious with hindsight.

Perhaps Acronis could adjust the manuals to stress this simple point.


Regards

Red faced Roger

 

Hello roger11,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Please note that the most probably reason for that is that boot sequence in BIOS is set to boot from CD-ROM first instead of hard drive. Please note that you should set the boot sequence to A:, C:, CD-ROM or some other, depending on where your Windows system is installed located.

Please note that you can find information about BIOS setup in Appendix B. "Hard disks and BIOS setup" in the Acronis True Image 9.0 Home User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov