Introducing AX64 Time Machine - hybrid imaging/snapshot software

Hi Brian, I'm embarrassed to say that I have never had to boot into a recovery media, and I don't know how to assign my cd drive to boot from and do the recovery from my AX64 recovery cd. Would you be kind enough to give me the step by step instructions? Thanks in advance.

 

No problem.

 

OK. Easy. Restart your computer with the recovery CD in the tray. At the Dell screen press (and tap) F12 for the Boot Menu. Choose the CD option and wait. Let us know what happens.

 

Hi Twilight,

I will let Brian to answer the above. However, I see that you have Macrium Reflect PRO and it shows up in your Recovery Environment.

So, Macrium is presented to you at boot time, as an option on your computer.

Check to see if you can you boot into Macrium Recovery Environment.

I am pretty sure that you will be able to!

Best regards,

 

It booted with no problems to the AX64 browser. I assume I normally would first plug in my external drive with the backups, and the backups would appear in the AX64 browser for me to choose one?

 

I will tomorrow. it's late here and I have to turn in.

 

Excellent. That's correct.

Can you do me a favour? Make a USB flash drive recovery media and let me know if it loads into the AX64 recovery environment. Same F12 method as you just used but choose USB instead of CD.

You obviously have a working winre.wim.

 

Thanks for this information and the ETA.

 

I got up to post 350 of this 2200+ post thread and I figured I'd save myself some time, I have another question.

Does ax64 have the ability to store its backups on different drives in case one of the backup drives should fail? I understand that these different backups would be completely separate from one another and that I would have to direct ax64 to do its incremental on whatever drive I would choose so I would have to alternate, would just prefer to have two completely different sets of backups in case one of the backup drives should fail.

Thanks,
Acadia

 

I'll do that some time today. Glad to hear I have a winre.win working.

 

From the FWIW dept...

Just fired up AX64 TM on a SkyTex 9.7" W7 tablet (poor man's version of M$ SURFACE)... works very well. SkyTex is a 1.5mhz, dual-core, hyper-threaded processor (4 processing streams) with 2gB of RAM and a 320gB internal HDD.

AX64 TM works as advertised. Willl upgrade shortly to W8 for the acid test.

 

I have had a big problem with my computer and have ended up re-installing Win 7.

This was not the fault of AX though might be some relevance.

I updated my BIOS (for other reasons) and was not able to boot up again. It might have changed the SATA drives to AHCI from IDE, but pretty sure it was set as AHCI.

Active@ is my imaging program and have a good range of proven images but although they would install ok, none of them would boot (I have several internal disks each with a different o/s on them).

The AX boot from my USB stick would not work

After spending many hours trying to overcome the problem and choosing different disks to boot from I had to succumb to a long re-install.

Prior to this I had installed EasyBCD. Thought that I had got rid of it before starting, but apparently not as that error kept coming up. It maybe the reason for my troubles but don't know enough to sort it.

The reason for writing this is whether AX it compatible with EasyBCD and if it correctly restores the MBR

 

Brian, I made the AX recovery media on a usb stick and booted into it successfully. It was about twice as fast as when I did it with the CD.

 

David,

Sorry to hear about this problem. The only thing that comes to my mind is that the BIOS upgrade that you've made switched on EFI boot mode. This explains why none of the recovery media worked. You could try to enter BIOS settings and see if EFI boot setting is on.

Isso

 

Acadia,

We don't support backup to multiple destinations yet. In fact we thought about it and the core implementation of this feature is done - supporting up to 4 destinations. However we need some time to incorporate it.

For now you might just make a copy the backup files from one drive to another.

Isso

 

Froggie,

Very interesting! I bet this is the first time someone runs AX64 on a tablet. So I guess I can officially say we are tablet-compatible See, that's why I made two big buttons for backup and restore

Isso

 

Thanks, Isso, this just might work if it is as easy as drag-and-drop for a second backup but would the recovery feature of ax64 be able to search for a new drive?

All said, your program just might be the future of imaging/snapshoting but you (and the others at your company) were here first.

Acadia

 

Hello Isso,

I just opened a ticket with the following information:

Logs have been sent... If you need anything else, please let me know... Thanks!

 

Hello Isso,

I have a question with the issue I posted in the previous post. How is this situation affecting future merges? All of my backups are appearing in the backup browser so is the "backup incremental chain" being kept intact? For example, if I were to delete/merge the image from 13 hours 47 minutes ago (the last incremental on the "old chain") with the image from 47 minutes ago (the "new full backup"), is the image actually merged or is it just deleted? Is it still a continuous "chain" of images or did the new full backup break that "chain" and in essence start a new one? If the "chain" has been broken, them would I just be able to open windows explorer to the backup folder and delete those "previous chain" images leaving only the new full backups and subsequent incrementals? Not that I will do this but I am trying to understand how my different images have been affected, if at all...

 

Thanks Isso

EFI is not a switchable option on this board although it is a UEFI board. So there should not have been an issue, anyway this is not relevant to this thread.

I did want to know if EasyBCD is compliant with AX64 in case that was causing problems with me. In particular restoring the MBR.

 

twl845,

Thanks for doing that. Excellent.

To look at the files and folders in the Recovery partition go to Disk Management, right click the Recovery rectangle, Change Drive Letter and Paths, Add, Assign the following drive letter, OK. Now go to Windows Explorer and search for a Recovery folder (containing bootre.wim) in that new drive. You have to Show Protected OS files.

When finished, right click the Recovery rectangle, Change Drive Letter and Paths, Remove, OK, Yes. You are now back to the status quo. No drive letter for the Recovery partition.

 

The tablet rez is 1024x768... so the buttons are HUGE!

Keep up the good work, Boss!

 

Hello Isso,

I do not know if this will help you or not, but after a bit of research on my system, I found the following in my Perfect Disk logs (see attached). There are two error entries in my Perfect Disk logs (only these two) and they both immediately precede the two times that AX64 has reverted to doing a full backup. Since this seems more than coincidence, I hope it helps as it seems something concerning my automatic "Stealth Patrol" Perfect Disk defrags could be contributing to this issue...

 

Sorry Isso,

When I looked at those logs, I thought the one for today said AM but it is actually PM. I had looked at it wrong and then thought PD had done a defrag overnight. Since I mistook the PM for an AM, then this error actually occurred after AX64 had done the full backup. So it appears now as I am wrong and these log entries have nothing to do with my issue, sorry for the mistake (getting old and eyesight not as good as it once was)...

 

Brian and ISSO,
I will check your above info later, but a strange thing has happened since i booted to the AX64 recovery media. I just accessed AX64 to make a manual backup. My external HD has always been designated E drive, but as I started the backup I saw that it was now called J drive. The backup took 25 minutes and is 741Mb in size. The notation at the top of the window said "External volume modification detected backup will take longer". So everything looks OK but my drive letter has been changed to J and the old designation of E is gone. The list of backups on my Ext. drive are all there, but have moved from near the bottom of the list of stuff to the very top.