Can't write to External USB hard drive with Recovery Manager

Can't write to External USB hard drive with Rescue Media

I'm a registered user, running the latest download of TI 2009 under Windows Vista SP1.

I installed the latest Recovery Manager on a USB thumb drive. I can boot from the thumb drive and start the True Image software. I have a western Digital 1TB external USB hard drive connected. The TI software can read from this drive, but it can't write to it. It can't even create a new file or folder on the drive, so it's not a data speed issue. It keeps reporting errors writing to particular sectors on the drive. It sometimes reports that the drive is read-only. It behaves as if the drive is mounted read-only.

I was hoping to be able to do a backup to this drive from the recovery Manager so I could back up an encrypted bitlocker partition. TI 2009 can write to this external USB drive running in Windows Vista, but not from the recovery manager boot software. The drive is in NTFS format. Is there a later build of the Recovery Manager files that I could try?

 

Do you mean that you created the rescue media on the thumb drive? The rescue media allows you to boot your computer and run the TI 2009 program.

The Recovery Manager is installed normally on an internal hard drive and is required to boot the system once it has been installed. Installing it on any external drive is definitely a bad idea since the system won't boot without that drive attached.

If you look at the external drive in Windows: Control Panel / Administrative Services / Computer Management / Disk Manaagement what is shown? Does it by any chance say that the drive has an EFI system?

Have your run CHKDSK d: /R (where d: is the drive letter of the drive) on this drive?

If you have the latest build of TI 2009 and have created the rescue media from that build, you have the latest version.

 

Yes, that's what I meant.

It displays as a normal hard drive. No mention of EFI system. (See combined image below taken from disk management and devices list.)

http://www.earthplanet.net/ExternalHD.jpg

It ran without a problem. In fact I have done more than one 200GB image to this drive using TI 2009, but it was running under Windows Vista, not the rescue media.

The version is: 12.00.0000.9709
The time stamp is: 1/21/2009 12:10 AM

 

Has anyone here been successful writing to an external USB hard drive using the rescue media software?

 

Yes.

Have you installed the SafeMedia (Safe Mode) version of TI and created a new TI CD/Flashdrive that includes it? Most newer computers will support USB drives through the BIOS which allows the Safe Mode version to use them (though at a very slow speed). If the Safe Mode version works with the drive, then it's most likely that the Linux drivers in the Full Mode version are not correctly supporting the hardware.

For the Full Mode version, have you tried the quiet acpi=off noapic option detailed in Section II of the PLEASE READ BEFORE YOU POST thread?

You might also try disabling Legacy USB support in the BIOS and disconnecting any unnecessary USB devices to see if they're causing any interference.

 

Thanks for the reply. I should have read the PRBYP section. I'll look into trying some of those tests/work-arounds and post back with my results.

 

Update:

I tried the quiet acpi=off noapic boot option. When I did that, the external USB drive didn't even show up in the list of available drives inside TI. I already had the legacy USB BIOS option turned off.

I just found the download link for the SafeMedia version of TI 2009. I'll try that later.

So it appears that the rescue media version of TI 2009 doesn't support my external USB drive. Too bad. It's the main reason I bought the product.

My only TI backup option appears to be decrypting bitlocker before doing a TI drive image under Vista. I've read that just disabling bitlocker wouldn't produce a recoverable backup image. Is that correct?

I hope Acronis plans to update the rescue media Linux drivers to better support the latest external USB drives. At least it appears to be able to read from the drive. Using the rescue media, I plan to try doing a full recovery to a clean hard drive from a backup image stored on the external USB drive. If that doesn't work, I will be asking for a refund.

 

You could contact Acronis tech support and explain the problem. They may be able to supply the ISO image of a special version of the TI 2009 Rescue CD that supports your hardware.

Another approach that's a bit more work, is to build a VistaPE boot disk with the TI plug-in. That uses the Windows drivers and should work with your hardware. The Mustang procedure for creating a VistPE disk is the easiest, and it only costs a few bucks to get his disk builder.

 

Thanks again for all the help. I was able to restore an unencrypted image to a clean hard drive using the recovery media. It produced a bootable Vista image on the new drive. So at least the USB linux drivers can read the drive.

For now, I can live with decrypting bitlocker before saving a recovery image. I also tested the SafeMedia mode, but it was too slow to be practical. The advantage of backing up in plain text is that the partitiions can be resized during a recovery.