Standalone & USB External Drive

After a CD boot, loading Standalone and selecting Acronis TI Home full version, is it possible to read/write a USB external drive? If so, this might be a good solution for laptops.

 

Yes, as long as the Linux drivers support the USB external drive and if they don't Acronis should be able to provide a version that does.

What's wrong with running the regular Windows version on the laptop to at least create and validate the image?

 

Yesterday, while in normal operation with windows, I created a full archive backup to my external firewire drive. The validation completed successfully with no problems. Saving to my firewire drive is a temporary solution as I have everyday uses for this drive. I eventually want a second external drive that is totally dedicated for Acronis backups.

After loading the boot CD, loading full standalone, I was not able to access my external firewire drive. But the user guide says USB devices are supported in this mode.

My thinking is this. If some disastrous problem happens and I need to CD boot, it would be nice to be able to access my full backup from an accessible USB external drive. Is this correct thinking?

Thanks...

 

Firewire drives are also supported in that mode as well and you probably have encountered the lack of a proper Firewire driver for your device in the Linux recovery environment. Note that this can be a problem for some external USB drives as well.

If this is the problem and you wish to pursue it, request support from Acronis for a solution or you can make the BartPE bootable CD with the plugin supplied in the current build (3567) of TI. You get the files for it placed on your HD with a full install or whatever it's called.

The BartPE environment is Windows and has much better driver support. See my reply (#3) in this thread:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=130667

 

seekforever

Thanks again for your help. It would be nice to get my firewire drive functioning first. I'm going to contact Acronis support concerning this matter. The BartPE solution is a bit beyond me for now. If Acronis can make the firewire work, then I may pursue the USB option.

 

MrDada, I would suggest you buy the external usb enclosure and hard drive separately. You would save quite a bit. And it is really simple to connect - just two cables to connect and you cannot connect them the wrong way.

I have four such enclosures that I bought separately and they all work with TI.

 

I whole heartily concur. The flexibility of an enclosure is great. I have used the ability to swap HDs into and out of the enclosure numerous times.

 

The external USB enclosure and separate drive is a new concept for me. I have a Dell laptop. Would this solution work for me. Any product recommendations that would not encounter the linux problem in full standalone mentioned above? Thanks for all helpful comments!

 

There's a large retail store selling a Maxtor 200GB 7200 RPM 3.5 ATA IDE for $49.98. Is this a drive that can be placed into an external USB enclosure? A search for these enclosures that turned up about a million of them. Do these type enclosures have the necessary USB convertors or hookups to make them work? It would be nice to find an inexpensive one that functions properly. Sorry, don't mean to be hawking any products here. More for informational purposes. If people can find cost effective solutions then Acronis will be able to sell more software.

 

MrDada - Check your PMs.

 

Most of the hard drive enclosures where you add your own hard drive work fine however I've had some bad experiences with some. One type called Blue Eye caused data corruption on my hard drive because of excessive heat build-up. I mainly use Skymaster enclosures with mesh sides and they are fine because they allow adequate ventilation without the need for a noisy fan in the drive enclosure but one model caused me a lot of grief. It was a model that allows you to use Sata drives in the enclosure.

It allows you to connect a Sata drive through a Sata bracket they supply and have full Sata drive speeds because the computer sees it as an internal drive. I did not read the fine print however that said that Sata drives should not be connected through the USB port on the enclosure and when I connected the drive this way an overcurrent warning message came up and all my USB ports on my expensive motherboard burnt out!

I tried to buy a second hand replacement board (Asus P4C800E-Deluxe Rev 2.0) on eBay only to discover that they often go for $400 far more than when new because they are so highly regarded! I still curse the company that made this particular external drive case because it is criminal to design an external drive case with USB connectors but if you use a Sata drive instead of an IDE drive you destroy the USB ports on your motherboard. No external drive case should be designed this way. I'd complain to the company but they are nowhere to be found on the internet.

I'm not the only person that is likely to have this experience with this particular external drive case. The company will be responsible for burning out many motherboards because of this badly thought out product which is still available because I can't contact the company to warn them about this presumably unintended consequence of connecting the case through USB when a Sata drive is installed. I have installed a USB PCI card to give me back the USB ports I should never have lost!

 

Hello MrDada,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please try booting with "acpi=off noapic" parameter as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

If the issue persists, please boot from Acronis True Image Bootable CD once again and create Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Please also provide us with the exact vendor and model of the USB hard drive you use.

After that please create an account, then log in and submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

Hi MrDada,

I believe Aleksandr meant your Firewire hard drive.

Regards

 

After using Acronis Boot CD, the full standalone does not recognize my firewire external drive. However, it does recognize a USB flash drive that I had plugged in. This sort of leads me to believe that a USB external drive would also be recognized. I guess I couldn't be totally sure unless I bought a USB drive and hooked it up. Trying to work out the firewire issue with support.

 

This probably only proves that TI's Linux based bootable rescue CD can detect your motherboard's USB sub-system. Equally as important is whether the rescue CD is compatible with your future external HD enclosure's USB to IDE Bridge chipset.

Regards

 

I received today a new USB (IDE/SATA combo) HD enclosure.

It's an LC Power EH-35BS model with it's own external power supply (thanks for the warning mareke).

From the data-sheet the chipset shoud have been a Cypress one, but what I got is a JMicron JM20337.

At the moment I have an IDE drive installed and the enclosure works well from the TI rescue environment. I'll probably buy a bigger SATA drive and will report back on the results.


Addendum, later.

Happy to confirm that the enclosure works well in rescue environement, now with a SATA-II drive inside.