Bart PE Plugin

I find it very hard to believe that Acronis will not supply this plugin to anyone that owns the product. They can't guarantee that the boot disk will boot with all systems, which I know for a fact it won't. How can you have a fix and not make it available to everyone? This will be a very bad business decision on their part. I didn't think they were like most other software manufacturers but maybe they are. I'll wait before I make my final decision about them.

 

Hello Rod,

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

Acronis True Image plugin for Bart PE will be included into future builds of the corporate versions of our products.

If you experience any problem with Acronis bootable rescue media that can be resolved using Bart PE - please contact support@acronis.com with the confirmation of the purchase and we will definitely provide you with this plugin.

Please understand that we cannot make it available for download to everyone cause this plugin installation and use doesn't require any serial number or other confirmation that you own the product.

Thank you.

--
Andrew Berezovsky

 

Thanks
I'll contact support.

 

Hello Andrew,

A good point. However, would it not be much more user friendly if Acronis modified the Product Registration process to include the user's Serial Number? The plugin could then be made available to a registered user as an optional download in his update selection list. I accept that not every user wants (or indeed is capable of using) a BartPE plugin but those that do probably needed it yesterday!!

Regards

 

How is that different than the Linux-based rescue CD? I mean, it's not machine-specific either. Someone could make copies of the Acronis Linux Boot CD and use them too, couldn't they?

 

Hello jimmytop,

Yes, you are right. But first you need to have this CD to be able to create copy of it. Furthermore, it is End-User License Agreement violation to copy any part of Acronis software. In general, the situation with this plug in is the same as with special ISO files that are given sometimes to our customers in case they have problems.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

There ARE BartPE plugins around which work for acronis, why not just use one of these and change the plugin serial key to your own?

I am suprised its taken acronis so long in developing a manager for the plugin because its already been created. The BartePE plugin WILL NOT USB boot so dont get your hopes up! you need another prog to make the bartpe usb bootable.

i wonder how long it will take them to release acronis with the bartpe plugin creator since it took them a year + to make another announcement about BartPE.

 

No, I don't think there is, I've looked for this myself.
Please provide a link to a working BartPE plug-in for TI 8 Standard (preferably current build). Not the Server edition plugin that has been posted about here before, it's for the wrong version, and no one could ever get it to work anyway.

 

Ilya, as much as I hate this saying, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other one. Having a Linux based boot CD is no more or less secure than a bartPE based boot disk.

In fact, when you go to download a BartPE plug-in for any particular commercial product, you only get the plug-in files. You don't get ANY of the commercial software files. This is because of the EULA's that you mentioned. One must own the commercial software files on their machine, and follow a slightly manual procedure to merge these with the plug-in files so that PEBuilder can create the boot CD.

I'll give you an example. The Adaware plug in for BartPE. You still have to have adaware installed on your machine and copy two files (the exe and the defs files) to the plug-in folder prior to using PEBuilder to generate the boot CD. The plug-in itself contains no Lavasoft software and therefore does not violate any Lavasoft EULA's to distribute the Adaware plug-in. This is how I would suggest that you distribute the TI 8 plug-in. Make the user copy the necessary Acronis files to the plug-in folder, including license key info.

If that user is dumb enough to give the disk away, then he/she is also dumb enough to give the linux disk away. Regardless of what the EULA says.

 

I wanted to make a similar reply Jimmy, but I know to little about how that BartPE plug-in business work to start making waves about. Thanks for confirming what I already hoped to be the case.

 

I have TI 8 v800

I emailed Acronis Support about problems I had with seeing a USB enclosure with IDE drive from the boot disk and I suggested that the BART PE TI plugin would help and asked for a copy

They emailed me back with a download link for the plugin within two days. No trying out other possible workaround first with the plugin as last resort.

Great service

I am trying it out tonight

 

Hello jimmytop,

I do understand your idea but I can't help in this field because I am not developing Acronis software. Neither do I define distribuition policies. Currently we can help only those customers who contact Acronis Support Team and provide the proof of purchase. The situation should change after the official release of Acronis True Image plug-in for BartPE. We expect it to happen soon.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Ilya, you're right, we shouldn't shoot the messenger. Since you are the most visible Acronis rep here, I'm sure you get that too much.
I apologies if I came off that way. Thanks for passing along our comments to whoever you can within Acronis.

 

Seems like I was neither naïve, nor over-optimistic

 

I contacted Support gave them my info to prove I bought TI and they emailed back, told me how to download the plugin and basic info on how to add it to Bart PE. I now have a bootable Bart PE CD that I can run TI from to restore my images.

Way to go Support.

Thanks,
Rod

 

Does it work? I mean, have you restored anything yet? Just wondering!

 

I am able to see the image, click on it and see all partitions. I didn't go any further but I have to think that restoring the partition(s) would work. I have one small partition that doesn't have anything real important that I might delete and try to restore as a test. I'll let you know if it works.

 

Just deleted and restored the partition booting into Bart PE. Worked without any problem.

Thanks again to Support for making the plugin available.

 

One last request to support.
This plugin is the answer to the problem that TI's boot disk can not boot all computers. It should be made available to anyone with proof that they bought TI. Maybe they can boot to the existing boot disk now but when it comes time to recover from a major crash they might not be able to. At that point how do you make a Bart PE disk? Please make it available or fix your boot disk so it will boot everything.

Thanks again,
Rod

 

Acronis sent me a link to download the BartPE plugin. Downloaded it and burned a CD with PE Builder 1.1.3 and Windows 2003. I was very let down. After booting from the CD, I noticed I had no local drive letters which is unfortunate because my backup files reside on the second NTFS partition which is my D: drive. I was able to map a network drive and backup to it. The tool for exploring a backup image or mounting it as a drive is not present. For what it’s worth, the build seems to be TI 8.0 build 791.

I then noticed there was a new release of True Image Corporate Workstation, build 1124. which was supposed to have the BartPE plugin as well. Sure enough, after downloading and installing it, I noticed the following directory:
C:\Program Files\Acronis\TrueImageWorkstation\BartPE
I also noticed the plugin file dates and sizes were more recent and larger. I burned a boot CD using this plugin, booted, and noticed there was a tool for exploring/mounting a backup image. But it wouldn’t mount the image and reported an error. Also, I had the same problem mentioned in the first paragraph of no local drive letters appearing. So my overall impression is this: Both plugins are ultra buggy and cannot be classified even as beta builds. They feel more like alpha. So there is a whole lot more work that needs to performed. My question is this: Is anyone else finding the massive number of bugs with this plugin as I?

 

I have tried the BartPE Plugin on both straight BARTPE as downloaded from the BART site and reatogo BART (which tries to make a custom plugin of your drivers as I understand it).

For the former version, until I added my motherboard SATA/RAID drivers in the BARTPE drivers/SCSIAdapter directory (and edited the txtsetup.oem file to only reference my XP driver), (or used F6 during startup) TI only saw my IDE drives not the two internal SATA drives. So I am happy with it as I have a working BARTPE with TI and an ability to add window drivers either via F6 or incorprated in BARTPE

With reatogo BARTPE build it makes no difference whether the SATA drivers in place or not. TI does not see any drives at all although the disk management program does.

I haven't yet tried my USB external drive- the reason I asked for the plugin- as I wished to get the 4 internal drives working first. I couldn't see the USB drive with the Acronis Boot disk. Next step.

 

I'll try it today, but where did you find the instructions for the plugin? Could you post the instructions?

 

A correction to my former post: I used Bart's PE Builder v3.1.3 (not 1.1.3)

For installing the plugin there is basically nothing to do other than expand the zip file that Acronis sends you (or in the case of TI Corporate Workstation use C:\Program Files\Acronis\TrueImageWorkstation\BartPE) and copy it to the plugin directory of wherever your BartPE builder files reside.

If you are using the Corporate Workstation plugin, you will notice that True Image will complain about no registration key every time you load it and then exit. You must do the following:
1) Install TI CWS on your local computer.
2) Start REGEDIT, go to HKLM\Software\Acronis\TrueImage, double-click the “workstation” key, press Ctrl-C to copy contents into clipboard.
3) Open ACRONIS.INF file that Acronis gave you which is inside the TI plugin folder and add the following with your registration key pasted as indicated:

[Software.AddReg]
0x1, "Acronis\TrueImage","workstation","paste software registration key here"

Then build the ISO file and burn it.

Just this morning, I tried building the BartPE boot CD using only the default settings and only the TI CWS plugin. Here are the results:
1. All drive letters on local hard drives are gone. I have verified this on three different computers. If I disable only the TI plugin and rebuild the CD, then all drive letters reappear. It is necessary that the drive letters are accessible because I store my backup images on drive D: which is a NTFS partition.
2. "Create an Image" wizard will fail giving error "Failed to read from the sector 63 of the hard disk 1"
3. "Explore Image" tool will fail giving error "Cannot Initialize Image Archive Explorer"

So basically, nothing works with the plugin that Acronis has provided. Any comments?

 

Yeah, I just had figured out the license issue and got it running. Thanks! Right now I'm running an image verification across the network. I'll add more to this post as I experiment. Ok, that worked. Now I'm imaging the C drive to a network location. So far these experiments are in VMware. The CD is actually built using "Ultimate Boot CD for Windows" version 2.41. This in turn uses BartPE 3.13.

Edit: I was able to image the C drive to a server and verified it there using the server's copy of True Image. Now I'm going to build a real CD (instead of using the ISO) and continue experimenting on real computers.