Restore Boot Partition via External Hard Drive

I am a newbie to this so please be patient if I ask a silly question. I have an initial image of my entire hard drive plus one incremental image. Because of the size I stored them on an external hard drive that uses either an IEEE-1394 or USB data connection. Earlier I extracted/restored a couple of specific files from the drive but now I have a bigger problem.

I need to restore my entire C: partition on the hard drive. Because that is the boot drive partition Acronis quits Windows 2000 and restarts in a mode where no apps are running. My problem is that the external hard drive is not seen by the OS when Acronis reboots it. Only internal hard drives are shown this mode.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to get the external drive to be recognized. It's a 320 GB Western Digital drive (USB 2/Firewire) and I'm using Acronis 8.

TIA
Cec Britton

 

Hello Dopey Duke,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

First of all, please make sure that you use the latest build (903) of Acronis True Image 8.0 which is available at: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/updates/

To get access to updates you should create an account at:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/my/
then log in and use your serial number to register your software.

If the problem still persists after installing the update then please create special Bootable Rescue CD using Acronis True Image 8.0 build 903, boot your PC from this CD and add quiet acpi=off noapic parameters to the Linux kernel settings as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

If that does not help then please create Linux system information (sysinfo.txt file) and Acronis Report (report.txt) in the way it is described in the same Acronis Help Post.

Please send these files to support@acronis.com along with the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Thanks Alexy! I am already registered but as soon as I post this I will check my version and if necessary get an update from the Acronis site.

Thanks Again
Cec Britton

 

Hmmm. I have a Western Digital external drive connected by Firewire and my system accesses it, just fine, when booted to the Acronis rescue CD. I'm not sure what else to tell you, because I didn't have to do anything special to make it work.

And, I have used it to make several successful restores in the past few days, so I am also sure it it 100% usable.

Tim

 

I might not have mentioned it, but I thought I had, I too have restored images of files to non-bootable partitions while running Acronis from Windows 2000. The problem showed up when I tried to restore the boot partition (C. That can't be done from inside Windows for obvious reasons. Acronis didn't see the external drive when the machine rebooted and started in Acronis.

In short the drive can be seen by Acronis from inside Windows but can not be seen after a boot to the Acronis boot CD.

 

Hello Dopey Duke,

That's because when you boot from the "full" rescue CD in order to restore the main system disk/partition, you are entering a Linux environment rather than Window.

If adding the commands "acpi=off" and "noapic" (without the quotes) after the word "quiet" doesn't work then it looks as if the Linux device drivers on the rescue CD are not compatible with your motherboard's Firewire/USB chipset or your external Firewire/USB HD enclosure. Note that you don't need to add the word "quiet" to the Linux kernal command line as it's already there (at least it was the last time I looked!!).

Just a thought but if you're currently connected via Firewire then try the USB connection or vice versa. Also, make sure your external HD is connected and switched on before you boot from the rescue CD.

Regards