Bootable media does not detect hard drive?

I have Acronis True Image Home 11 installed on my system and have successfully created backups of my C drive to my D drive and also restored those backups all from WITHIN Windows Vista.

For the first time today I thought I should test that I could restore a backup using a bootable CD. I created the bootable CD using Acronis (placing nothing in startup parameters)and rebooted the PC. Acronis loaded properly but when I tried to select my backup from the D drive nothing appeared. As a test I examined the C drive and everything on that drive appeared. The only difference between my SATA C drive and my SATA D drive is tha the D drive is actually 3 hard disks in a RAID 5 array.

My conclusion is that when I access the D drive from within Vista Acronis does so using the drivers resident within the operating system. However, when using the bootable media, presumably, Acronis has no driver (Intel MatrixStorage Manager) and so cannot see the contents of my RAID drive.

Can anyone please tell me how to resolve this problem?

 

If C: is the booting Vista partition and you restored it WITHIN Vista, Vista would have had to reboot to do the restore. Did it? Was it an entire image or disk restore or did you just select to restore several files as a test?

TI would boot from Vista into the Full mode, so it's odd that it didn't work from the CD and did from Vista, unless the build on your computer is newer (8,053) and the build on your CD is older (8,027), for example. If this is the case, create a new CD with Media Builder.

You could also download the Safe Mode Plugin from your Acronis Account and include that on the CD. Since you are using internal drives, it should see the RAID drive and allow you to restore.

 

I'm confused, you say you did a restore -- was it a restore to the system (Vista) drive? I'm confused because to restore the system drive, ATI has to reboot into a diff environment - it does so by rebooting into a linux environment the same as it uses when it boots from the CD.

Prior versions of ATI were able to deal with Intel chipset RAIDS -- It's in version 11 where the RAID blindness came.

Suspecting the linux drivers is a good guess, although it could be more complicated than that -- new version of linux -- new program code in ATI, etc. But undoubtedly it has something to do with ATI 11's weakness at recongnizing various RAIDs, especially Intel's. I doubt that safe mode (i.e., when ATI boots into a DOS environment instead of linux) will help with RAID recognition but it wouldn't take long to try it and find out for sure.

 

As far as I can tell, they are using a much newer Linux kernel. For example, using TI 11 in VirtualPC requires to i8042.noloop parameter to allow the mouse to work just as the newer versions of Ubuntu do (Feisty and Gutsy).

I've always had good success with the Safe Mode recognizing my RAID drives. If the RAID is setup in the BIOS, there's a good chance Safe Mode will see it.

 

My C drive is the Vista boot drive and I was restoring the entire C drive so, yes, the system did re-boot and it worked.

I used Acronis build 8053 to create the bootable media and it used Acronis build 8053 in attempting to restore my C drive. Unfortunately it does not see my backup images on my RAID 5 D drive. I agree it is very strange

I have not tried the Safe Mode Plugin so I shall give it a try.

Many thanks for your kind suggestions.

 

MudCrab,

I have now downloaded and used the Safe Mode Plugin on my bootable media and am delighted to report that it worked perfectly - I can now see my backup images on my RAID 5 D drive.

Many thanks for your help