Can't select target drive for restore

You are absolutely right. It's a bug that stops you from doing what you bought the program for.

Unfortunately, some people don't try to do a restore as soon as they make a backup, so they don't know that it will fail. You never should assume you have a backup until you have done a restore, or at least done everything up to the actual restore.

For example, you should boot from the Recovery CD and confirm that you can see all your drives and can validate your backup. That's an essential step.

You should also go as far with a restore as seeing the final screen with the "Proceed" button. Don't push it unless you really want to restore, but confirm that you can get to that point.

 

Hello johnstar,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Backup software.

We are really sorry for the inconvenience you are currently experiencing due to the issue under consideration.

Usually the partition you are going to restore to can be grayed out due to the amount of the backed up sectors in the image is more than the amount of the sectors mentioned partition has. If the partition has not been resized after the backing up the probable reason of the issue can be in disk errors. Windows can detect the size of the partition in the wrong way (for example it detects that the partition is two bytes less than it is in reality) and that is why Acronis True Image "thinks" it can't find room for the data image contains. If the partition you are trying to restore to contains bad sectors the result will be same: Acronis True Image can't find room for the data image contains and the destination partition will be grayed out.

So we would recommend you to check disk for errors running "chkdsk X: /r" without quotas in the Command Prompt (X: should be changed to the letter of the partition you are checking) and create backup again, then please try to restore and check if the issue persists. We would also recommend you to create backup under Acronis Bootable Rescue Media to be sure there is no any 3rd party application which can interfere with Acronis True Image and prevent it from creating backup correctly.

If the issue still persists please submit a request for technical support with the attached Acronis System report and the link to this thread. Please specify also whether you create backup using sector-by-sector approach or not. Could you please try both ways and check how this affects the issue? This information is crucial for issue investigation. You can find instructions how to create Acronis report in this post. Please be sure we will do our best to help you as soon as possible.

Thank you
--
Nikita Sakharov

 

Here is my experience....

Downloaded latest ATI 11 yesterday; installed on clean install of Vista Premium SP1 on C:; imaged the C: Vista partition (not sector by sector) to DVDs, made DVDs bootable; booted into ATI from DVDs and immediately tried to restore image back to same C: partition. End result -- would not let me restore to C:. I also booted back into Vista and ran ATI to try the restore from there -- same result. I have done a chkdsk c:/r and everything is perfectly clean (BTW, this is a brand new machine).

Note that I am running the trial version and was anticipating purchasing, however, if I cannot use the images created then I'm not sure this is worth the investment. I would really like this to work as I am trying to save a clean "baseline" image of my system before I start to install other apps.

Any suggestions on how to correct would be gratefully accepted. Is there a way to turn on logging to see the sector counts of the backup versus the partition I wish to restore to?

 

One more bit of data on the issue...

When picking the partition to restore from the backup (only one partition to choose from other than the MBR) it says:

Capacity 48.83 GB
Free space 36.38 GB
Start 2048
End 102,402,047

When I get to the screen asking where I would like to restore the partition to I get the grayed out:

Capacity 48.83 GB
Free space 36.27 GB
Start 2048
End 102,402,047

Note that the data is the same no matter if I boot from DVD or run ATI from within Vista.

 

Thanx for the reply Acronis Support,

but i will have to say i am not here to test this software, this is your job! I am resigned to the fact its a duffer ( with my system anyway ).

I used a Bootable Rescue Media CD to create the image ( using the safe media option ) because the full option just crashed and rebooted to the same menu.

'partition image' is what was selected

The laptop is brand new, I checked disk for errors ( none reported )

I will pop by from time to time to see if an update to fix the issue is available ....

 

Alas. these are known issues for ATI11 and how it behaves on some hardware. I pointed months ago that the ATI11 bootCD can, in some cases, see a drive when you look for a source file to restore but not seethat same drive when you try to pick a target drive to restore to.

Unless you want to work with Tech Support, gathering info and trying diff iso files to burn to cd to make diff BootCDs, your chices are to make BArtPE or VistaPE disks -- some folks prefer them anyway ;-) or wait until a new build of ATI 11 comes out and see if it fixes the prob or seek another vendor. Probably better to check the updates page on Acronis's website than the forums. If the build number doesn't change, then ATI11's problematic buikld has not been replaced.

 

Hello gwww,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Backup software.

Many thanks for such a detailed description of the situation. Could you please submit a request for technical support with the attached Acronis report file and the link to this thread? This will let us investigate the issue and provide you with solution or appropriate workaround as soon as possible. You can find instructions how to create Acronis report file in Acronis Help Post.

Thank you
--
Nikita Sakharov

 

I note that this is a partition created by Vista (2048 Start offset), so this may be part of the problem that TI has with this new offset.

Are there any other partitions on this drive? Data partitions or OEM recovery partitions?