Acronis let me down

After reading all of the positive feedback about Acronis True Image I thought it would be easy to get my backup working.
After a fresh install I did a disk image backup to my external USB drive. One day My hard drive crashed so I plugged drive, loaded the recovery disk but it could not see the USB drive no matter how many times I rebooted. No problem.
I took the USB drive to work and burned the backup file to a DVD. Now Acronis cannot even see the damaged SATA drive no matter how many times I boot. ?
It sounded like a hardware problem but the Bios sees the Sata drive. A day later I had to do a full reinstall of windows to get my machine working to write up this problem. I understand there may be tweaks and starange command lines to possibly fix the problem but when your PC is dead its hard to read the forums to read up. I stayed away from partitioning a seaction off on the drive to keep things as simple as possible to improve my chances of it working. Can anyone recommend a good simple probgram fo doing hard drive backups?

miker

 

1. What version of TrueImage are you using?

2. Did you ever test the bootable Recovery CD to see whether it could see both your SATA drive and external USB drive?

3. What brand of computer/motherboard/external hard drive do you have.

Try these tips recently suggested by BVolk in another thread:
- apply the "quiet acpi=off noapic" parameter as detailed in the
"Please Read Before You Post sticky"
- disconnect every unneeded USB device
- don't use an USB hub, plug the external direcly, possibly to a rear panel port
- connect and power up the external drive before booting from Rescue CD
- wait for a minute on the selection screen to give time to the external to initialize

TrueImage supports lots of hardware, but there is some that is not supported (especially in the Linux environment required to restore the boot partition). If these suggestions don't help, you may be one of the unlucky ones whose motherboard isn't supported.

 

You could also create a BartPE disk with the True Image plug-in and boot that and see if you could see your external hard drive.

 

Merlin is right. It's more work, but a BartPE disk may work perfectly when the Linux environment doesn't recognize your hardware.

 

Hello miker,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

First of all, please make sure that the bootable CD is created with the latest build (3677) of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home. To get access to updates you should first register your software.

We recommend you to create a new Acronis True Image Bootable Rescue Media, because each new build brings such improvements as better hardware support etc.

If the issue persists, please try booting with "acpi=off noapic" parameter as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

If the issue still persists, please provide us with the exact vendor and model of the USB hard drive, create Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Also create Acronis Report in the way described below:

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;

- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;

- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;

- Boot the computer from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;

- Collect the report file from the floppy.

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov