safe boot vs full boot, can you help please

as I have a sata drive in my pc I was advised to use the full boot media to do restores, I assume its to do with the hardware support available on the disk, but after stage 1, stage 2 would fail after a few mins, leaving me with a deleted 'c' drive and a partition sized and unformatted amount of free space. process was also supposed to take 4 hours not the 16 mins the image took to create via windows.

using TI 8 plus an o/s on a second hdd temporarily plugged in to pc along with the first, I restored the partition from the image using TI 8 in windows. then I created a safe boot disk and tried that.
despite acronis telling me that the boot media did not afterall support my raid controller, which led me to assume the restore would fail again, it did not, it also said 16 mins to do it and thats what it took.

I cannot understand why, can anybody enlighten me please?

 

Hello Neil,

You are probably aware that the "full" bootable rescue CD is Linux based and, as you found out, may or may not contain the correct Linux device drivers for your particular hardware. Each new build of TI will create a rescue CD that contains some additional as well as better (not always!!) optimized Linux drivers.

On the other hand, the "safe" rescue disk uses a combination of DOS and your motherboard's BIOS to access your hardware. Most newer motherboards now have SATA controllers and USB ports that function via the BIOS rather than through software drivers and therefore, in many cases (such as yours), can be detected by TI's "safe" boot rescue CD.

Hope that helped.

Regards

 

Hello Neil,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please clarify what you mean by "stage 1" and "stage 2"? Also please let us know the full model name of your SATA controller and what error you got while restoring the image. Where was the image stored?

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

thanks menorcaman, maybe answer will help others who haven't tried safe boot yet.

in answer to supports question, I sent pictures of all relevant pages to acronis support and they told me there was no support yet for my raid controller, took about a week to get it sorted.

when you go to restore a copy of a partition the window above the proceed button, which is the last thing you click on before the restore starts, has two stages named in it, one above the other.
stage 1 is the heading above the details of the partition it says will be deleted.
stage 2 is the heading above the details of what will be restored to that partition.
you click proceed and you don,t even see it do stage 1, its that quick, it then says proceeding with stage 2.2, and nothing can be heard happening on the hdd. a few mins later and its all just frozen up. you then find when you reboot to get out of it, that you have no 'c' partition at all, its just unformatted free space.
it is a-

via technologies sata raid controller
viamraid.sys driver file
5.1.2600.300 file version
the backup was kept on the same hdd on the third partition
'c' is primary active
'd' and 'e' are logical drives all formatted ntfs

thanks

 

Hello Neil,

We are really sorry for the problems with VIA RAID. We are currently correpsonding with VIA Technologies in connection with the driver for their chipset for Linux platform. As soon as we get the driver it will be implemented into our software and Acronis True Image will be able to work properly.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman