USB flashdrive still failing with 9615 build

I can't get a USB flashdrive disaster recovery disk made with TI Home 2009 to boot. The loader starts, but immediately stops with an error message:

Acronis Loader Fatal Error: Bootdrive (partition) not found. Press <enter> to try to boot your OS....

I press enter and it boots to the hard drive.

Chat support has given me two new builds, with the last one (9615) supposedly the one which would fix this problem for certain. It did not.

Computer is an HP Pavilion dv9700z laptop with 3 gigs of RAM. Brand new.

Any ideas that might help? I also have TI 11. Should I roll back to that?

One last thing. When I was on with Chat support after build 9615 failed, we communicated for a few minutes to re-explain my problem. At that point the chat tech told me to hang on. And never came back. I waited 45 minutes and sent a couple of requests for a response, but nothing. Eventually I had to go to sleep and logged off.

Similar thing happened this evening. Explained the issue to a chat tech, and then no response. I only waited 10 minutes this time before logging off.

Is this normal for them when they don't have an answer?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

 

1. The flash drive your currently using worked as a bootable rescue media for ATI 11?
2. Have you tried another flash drive? because based on experience I've had several flash drives not being able to boot and receiving the same error. But there are a rare few that worked.
3. Bootable FDs are still not that mature and I would stick with a CD for the Rescovery Media and the FD as the storage of your backups.

 

What size flashdrive are you using?

I just tried an 8GB FAT32 flashdrive that worked fine with TI 11 and got the same error. I didn't do any testing, though (I just booted through Grub4DOS to run TI).

 

I tried it with 2, 256 Mb size flashdrives. One of indeterminate manufacture that I got from my employer, and the 2nd a Sandisk Mini Cruzer 256. Both gave the same error. I had not tried them in v11 (I upgraded from v8 to v11, and the next day v2009 was released, so I never really used v11).

Good news is I got it to work by changing the boot order in the CMOS Setup program. This computer (HP Pavilion dv9700z) has the option to select the boot device by pressing F9 at startup. I didn't need to do that for booting from either the CD or hard drive, because the Default boot order is CD/DVD first, then C:\ second. If there is a CD in the drive it boots from the CD, and if there is no CD in the drive, it boots from c:\.

But I had been using F9 for the USB flashdrive so the computer would bypass the hard drive. On the chance that this was causing the problem, I went into the CMOS setup program and changed the boot order permanently so the computer looks for a USB flashdrive first. And now it boots ok from the flashdrive. I tested the program by validating an old archive, then creating and validating a new backup. All worked without a hitch.

I still don't know why I had to make this change. My best guess is that there may be a conflict with drivers for a USB floppy device, or it may have mistaken the flashdrive for a USB floppy device (which is another of the boot options that was ahead of USB flashdrive in the default configuration). Initially I both disabled floppy booting and moved up the USB flashdrive to the #1 boot device. When that worked, I re-enabled booting from a USB floppy and the flashdrive still booted ok. I figure that if the boot order uses the flashdrive as #1, the computer would never look for a USB floppy (when a USB flashdrive was present) and there would be no conflict.

Thanks for your assistance. I hope that my experience is helpful in diagnosing a similar problem for others. Thanks again.

Also, btw, I eventually got a Chat Tech who reviewed my case, agreed that we had done all the things that the first level support could do, and referred it to a tier 2 tech. I was contacted by a tier 2 tech within 24 hrs. While his suggestions didn't work, they were thought-out and reasonable. If the 2 chat techs in the middle of this process had only done what the last first level tech did, I think I would have felt very good about Acronis tech support. Now, I just feel lucky to have eventually gotten one of the correctly trained first level chat techs.

Thanks again for the suggestions. Barry.