Acronis Rescue Boot CD won't boot

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by rkmvca, Mar 16, 2005.

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  1. rkmvca

    rkmvca Registered Member

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    Acronis TI 8.0, build 768 . I have an Athlon 64 system, MSI Neo Platinum motherboard.

    My C: drive is 2x Maxtor 60GB SATA HD in RAID 0; my F: drive is 160GB Seagate UATA. I use Acronis to regularly back C: onto F:. I have had no issues doing the backups.

    One of my Maxtor RAID 0 drives went bad. I had to replace it and rebuild the RAID array.

    I have been trying to boot off the Acronis CD to reinstall the image from F: to C:, but it will not boot. It gets to where it appears to be loading device drivers, and the last 3 lines on the screen are :

    "sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
    Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
    sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray"

    and it just hangs here. This is with all external USB devices unplugged. With some USB devices/ports plugged in, it just hangs here.

    I have tried installing Windows XP on C:, booting off C: and putting Acronis TI image on it. That works, and it finds the image on F: no problem, but of course it can't install it onto C: because it's being used.

    Please help; my system has been down for over 2 weeks now.

    Thanks

    Rich K.
     
  2. MiniMax

    MiniMax Guest

    I would physically disconnect the RAID, and attach the 160 GB Seagate UATA drive as a master drive on the ATA bus. Then I would create a new primary & active partition (or convert an existing partion) on the 160 GB Seagate drive and temporarily install Windows there.

    Make sure you can boot from the Seagate and then reconnect the RAID. Verify that Windows will still boot from the Seagate.

    Install the RAID drivers in the temporary Windows install, rebuld the array, install TrueImage, and copy the image back to the RAID.

    Disconnect the Seagate and try booting from the RAID. You might need to use utilities like FIXMBR and FIXBOOT to make the RAID bootable.

    Finally, reconnect the Seagate and verify that everything is okay.
     
  3. rkmvca

    rkmvca Registered Member

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    thanks Minimax.

    I was thinking of doing exactly that as my deep backup plan (always good to get confirmation!). It was my backup because I figured, exactly as you did, that it would cause some MBR problems when I put it all together again.

    I was hoping that somebody from Acronis would come up with some suggestions for creating a bootable CD that actually works on my system.

    thanks again,

    Rich K.
     
  4. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello rkmvca,

    Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

    First of all, please download the latest (800) build, which is available on our web site at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/updates/. To get access to updates you should register your software first at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/registration/. Please disable any download managers, internet download/connection boosters, etc. before the download.

    After that please create new Acronis Bootable CD with this build and try using it. If you still have any problems please try the "acpi=off noapic" workaround (please see https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=55317 for the instructions) and in case it doesn't work please create sysinfo.txt file (described at the same link mentioned above) and send it to support@acronis.com along with the link to this thread.

    Thank you.
    --
    Ilya Toytman
     
  5. rkmvca

    rkmvca Registered Member

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    OK. Once I downloaded the upgrade to revision 800 and burned a CD off that, I was able to boot. I am now able to boot off the CD, and enter the graphical interface. I can go through the recovery screen until I get to the 'restored hard disk drive location' screen.

    Here, my desired target drive, C: , which is a RAID0 array of 2 Maxtor 0GB SATA drives, is grayed out. Acronis appears not to recognize the fact that they are a RAID array; they are listed separately.

    Moreover, the drive which contains the image, which is normally the F: drive in my system (a 150GB Seagate) is recognized by Acronis as the C: drive, again leading me to think that Acronis is not recognized the RAID array.

    What should my next step be?
     
  6. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello rkmvca,

    Could you please let us know the model of your hard disk controller? The thing is that current version of Acronis True Image supports NVRAID only under Windows. Acronis Bootable CD currently supports NForce3 and NForce4 chipsets only in non-RAID mode.

    Thank you.
    --
    Ilya Toytman
     
  7. rkmvca

    rkmvca Registered Member

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    Just for everybody's information, I solved the problem using pretty much exactly the technique outlined by Minimax in post #2.

    I have to say that I am disappointed in Acronis's inabiliity to handle raid drives properly, but once it was running properly on Seagate: drive the restore worked like a charm. It did not even requre any fixmbr work. I just restored the image to the RAID array, shut down and disconnected the Seagate, and rebooted off the RAID array without a hitch. Then I shut down again, reconnected the Seagate, and everything was in its proper place.

    Thanks all, and especially Minimax.

    regards

    Rich K.
     
  8. MiniMax

    MiniMax Registered Member

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    Posts:
    566
    You are welcome, Rich. It is good to hear that you are up and running again.

    In Acronis defense, it must be said that NVIDIA is also to blame. I do not claim to understand much about their nForce RAID-controllers, but I think a large part of the problem is that the RAID-controllers are "soft"; that is the are only able to do their magic with the help of the operating system - which means that the operating system needs drivers from NVIDIA. Being "soft" also means cheaper than professional RAID controllers that handles all the RAID'ing in the hardware and hides the details from the operating system.

    I had a look at the download section of www.nvidia.com, and found no drivers for Linux. So I assume, that Linux users can not use the nForce RAID features at all - unless they go for software RAID, where 100% of the RAID'ing takes place inside the operating system.

    Which brings me to the point of this post... A friend of mine told me (so it could be true, it could be false) that the reason that Adaptec became the prefered SCSI controller for serious Linux users was that Adaptec quickly abandoned the idea of keeping their RAID drivers proprietary when they saw that free (and in some respect more capable drivers) was becoming availble. Instead Adaptec donated their ars driver to the Linux community and thus helped create a RAID driver that was much better than the competition. And they sold loads of cards....

    I don't know if the story is true, but if it is I hope NVIDIA will soon learn from history (although the only thing history learns us, is that noone ever learns from history).
     
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