Areca 1231ML

Purchased TI 10 Home for my workstation which uses an Areca 1231ML RAID card.

Through Windows (Vista Ultimate) I can back up drives but there is no way to restore them as TrueImage will not see the drives (volumes) from either the "reboot" method or booting from a cd. Somehow Areca drivers must be loaded or added to TrueImage.

It will see the drives in safe mode but that doesn't do any good for the reboot method (recover through Windows).

I tried it in safe mode and it saw the drives but I had to run the Windows recovery as it didn't recover properly.

Any suggestions? As it is TI is useless to me.

Thank You

James

 

The only way to get updated drivers incoroporated into the rescue CD is to raise an official support ticket with Acronis with the problem. By doing this you will also get TI improved for others as well.

The other option that you can do yourself is to build a BartPE CD. You probably will have to add the Areca drivers to it.

There are a couple of ways of making the BartPE disk. One uses the plugin that came with your TI distribution file. You have to do something like a Complete install to have the plugin files placed on your HD. The other way is to use Mustang's files.

See:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=162424

for more information on the Mustang method. Building a BartPE disk looks a little intimidating at first but once you get going you will see that most of it is automated.

 

Thanks for the informative reply. I'll put in a support ticket. In the meantime I'll checkout the BartPE options.

Thanks again.

James
ePlanet Design

 

I asked about the 1231ML months ago, they came up with a fix but still haven't added it to TI Home or Workstation. I need it added to TI Workstation and Universal Restore. They will probably wait until the next version comes out so I'll have to pay to upgrade to make it work. If that's the case me and our company is finished with Acronis. We'll find another backup system.

 

James,

You say they came up with a fix. Does that mean you got a custom version that worked? Or did they just tell you they had it fixed and didn't give you the fixed version?

Acronis currently has multiple things "fixed" for TI 10, but has not release a new build yet.

Have you requested a custom Workstation build with the drivers you need?

Did you try the BartPE CD with the necessary drivers? (It's usually faster than the TI CD anyway.)

 

At the time I was working with TI Home 10. They sent me an ISO for a bootable cd which apparently has the right drivers for the 1231ML as it works. The backups work in Vista but I have to restore via the ISO they sent me.

I just now tried Paragon Drive Backup 8.51 Professional. Works perfectly with Windows Vista and the Areca 1231ML... and it's almost (if not) as fast as TI. They also have competitive upgrade with 50% off. Bye Bye Acronis.

If you want that iso you can probably contact the helpdesk and request it. My support ticket number was: [Acronis #1033500], you might refrence that ticket.

 

One thing about that ISO, it takes forever to load the drivers, then select archive, all that stuff, and my MX Revolution mouse won't work with any Acronis recovery cds and the whole thing just pissed me off. Paragon is instant as I don't have to boot from a CD, takes about 3 minutes to reboot and restore 17GB. (5 Raptor drives in RAID 5).

 

Just to clarify, when you booted from the Recovery CD and selected SAFE mode, you could see all the drives and do a restore.

After the restore, you had to use the Windows installation CD to Repair the installation before it would boot properly. After that it ran normally.

If the above is correct, then you are seeing a minor but annoying bug in TI 10. On Vista systems, if the entire boot drive (all partitions and MBR) is imaged and the entire drive is restored, the system will boot. If only the C partition is restored, a repair is often required.

After this repair has been done once, future images of just the C partition can be restored and the system will boot normally without a repair.

So, the SAFE mode of the Recovery CD may work for you for future images now that you have done the repair.

 

HUH? I don't want to use SAFE mode and I don't want to use a recovery CD.. it takes like 45 minutes to recover my Drive C (17gb of data) in safe mode. I need the 1231ML drivers added to TI 10.

But yes I am aware of the Vista bug. And I don't remember if you had to repair it with every recovery or not. It takes so friggin long I probably didn't try it.

Paragon BP 8.51 worked perfect out of the box with the 1231ML, first time every time, no boot issues or anything. Takes about 3 minutes to recover the entire volume / mbr (17gb).

 

Somebody has been posting a lot of mentions of Paragon -- trollers or paid posters?? Paragon, like most the other backup programs relies on Linux as an OS for doing restores. Paragon is as susciptible to Linux problems as any of the others.

Some backup/imaging programs avoid Linux by using a version of DOS, which is generally much more limited in the hardware it can handle.

A person needs to see what works on her or his machine and decide. I think most of them offer free trials. A few have forums, but few have forums as well developed as the Acronis forum; For software generally, I found that forums are where all the real support is.

sh