Acronis TI 10 and an e-sata drive.

Hello there. I just bought a SATA II external enclosure device with an e-sata interface connection for fast file transfer speed along with a brand spankin' new internal drive to stick in it, to back up me and my girlfriend's computers. Lo and behold, it appears that Acronis 10 can't restore an image from this new external set up. The drive shows up and I can write an image to it using TI in Windows XP, but it gives me a warning before hand saying that the image can't be restored from the rescue media (a.k.a. an Acronis boot disk).

Sure enough, I can't access the e-sata drive after I boot from my Acronis rescue disk (either in full or safe mode) to restore an image from it. The drive doesn't show up in the directory tree.

Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing a setting to change in my BIOS? The drive IS recognized by the BIOS on boot. This really defeats the purpose here.

Should I just plug the drive in internally and buy another drive for my girlfriend to do the same? I was hoping to keep data off site.

TIA

 

So I take it that external drives aren't recognized in DOS, therefore aren't recognized by Acronis from the rescue CD?

Is there some sort of work around?

It seems so simple in theory. All I want to do is to be able to write and restore an image of my system directly from an external drive.

 

The problem may stem from the ATI boot media (linux) not recognizing SATA drives in some cases. I'm currently researching a similiar issue where ATI v11 (8101) cannot recognize any of my SATA drives on my new system that uses an Intel ICH10R chipset. I recall seeing some post about the issue here on the boards. If I find the post I'll update this reply with a link.

So far it seems like there is an issue with ICH9 and ICH10 chipsets where the linux boot media may not recognize SATA drives. ATI seems to work fine for backups within Windows, but when you go to do a restore and need to boot off the ATI boot media, it will not "see" the SATA drives and the restore fails. My old system uses an Intel ICH8R chip and the ATI v.11 boot media has worked great with all my internal SATA drives.

I have found that the ATI boot CD will recognize USB drives connected to the new ICH10R system (thumb drive/memory stick & external hard drive enclosures), but nothing I do in the BIOS allows the ATI boot CD to recognize the internal SATA drives.

Now in your case, which may or may not be related, do you know what chipset your system board uses for the ESATA connection? Do you have internal SATA drives that you are able to backup and restore to using the boot media? (aka, can you see all your internal drives and the only drive you are having an issue on is the eSATA drive?)

I sent an email last night to Acronis questioning if there is a newer version of ATI 11 (Build 8101) that fixes the boot media issue and I'm eagerly awating a response.

 

Thank you for your response. I just gave up, ripped the drive out of the enclosure and mounted it internally. I'm sick if messing with it.

It's really stupid why this doesn't work and isn't straightforward. Anyone need an enclosure

My motherboard is a P965/ICH8R chipset. Yes, the boot media has no problem seeing the internal SATA drives, but didn't recognize either the USB or the E-SATA port (I tried both). The drive didn't show up in the directory "tree" at all, either way.

 

Hello all,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

70_Malibu, the encountered issue can be related to the outdated version of Acronis True Image. I may recommend you to install a trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2009, create Acronis Booting Rescue Media and try to get the access to eSATA drive.

ATIUser, I may recommend you to use our Live Chat service here, we will provide you with an ISO file to create another Acronis Booting Rescue Media.

Thank you.

--

Oleg Lee