Weird undocumented screen at boot after installing Backup Capsule Boot

Hello,

We have just purchased 6 licenses for Paragon Backup and Recovery 10 Suite, to cover all our systems.

I have been trying to set up booting from the Backup Capsule using the Manage Backup Capsule tool/wizard. The system I'm trying this with first is dual-boot Fedora 13 (x86_64) and Windows 7 Ultimate x64, with GRUB as the bootloader. The Win7 System Reserved partition (200MB) is the only primary partition on HD1, the remainder of the space on HD1 is an extended partition, 350GB or so of which is the Win7 C: partition (extended logical), and roughly 125GB remaining is the Backup Capsule (also an extended logical). The 2nd HD contains an extended partition with logical partitions (windows D:, linux /, and linux swap). GRUB has no trouble booting either OS before setting up the backup capsule.

(Most of the other systems I intend to use this with only have Windows installed on them).

The capsule seems to be _created_ fine, and I can create backups and save them there, and see them afterwards, etc. However I am not able to boot the system afterwards. I am greeted at boot with a mostly-black background text screen with 2 lines of information. The first line, near the top of the screen, is rather colorful, using green, cyan/blue, white/gray, and I think even a little red to display a summary of the single primary partition on hard disk 0 - the 200MB System Reserved primary partition. It shows disk 0, partition 0 (I think), 200MB primary, NTFS, System Reserved (the volume label) and characterizes it as a ?something?/Vista/7 partition.

The other line near bottom of the screen says to insert a startup disk in the floppy drive and press F2 to run setup.

I have never seen anything like this before on this machine. I am pretty certain it is not coming from the BIOS, GRUB, or Windows 7.

When setting up the boot options I told it to look for F11 as the key to boot the Backup Capsule and to wait up to 15 seconds. But I never see the message instructing me to press F11. I see a series of 3-4 dots very quickly in top left of screen (less than a second) and it immediately takes me to the screen described above.

It seems to take pressing Enter as an option but it doesn't actually do anything. The system will sit on a black screen indefinitely. Also, if I hit F2 the system basically locks up.

I have read all the Paragon documentation I can find about setting up the Backup Capsule. While I did see some mention of it rewriting the MBR and possibly needing to correct it if you are using a 3rd-party boot manager, there is nothing I have found describing anything like this screen I'm seeing and what I am supposed to do next. But it seems pretty safe to assume this is coming from the Paragon software since I've only seen it when trying to set up booting from the backup capsule.

What kind of startup disk is it talking about? A boot floppy I am supposed to create in Windows before rebooting? Why does it need this? More importantly, why isn't there any documentation to prepare you for it ahead of time instead of needing to restore my system from recovery media so I can boot?

I could of course be wrong about this coming from the Paragon Backup Capsule boot setup. I do have Nortons Internet Security 2011 running on the system but it is not logging any blocked actions, etc.

Has anyone else seen anything like this setting up the Backup Capsule to boot from with Windows 7? What am I supposed to do so I can use it?

I do know how to make a bootable floppy (startup disk) in Windows, assuming Windows 7 still has that capability. I just don't know (since there is no documentation to this effect from Paragon) that this is even what this screen is talking about it wanting.

Help would be appreciated. I need to get this figured out primarily for my mother's computer which is several hours' drive (round trip) away and back. This feature is one of the main reasons we chose to purchase this software over other options.

Thank you,
24junkie

 

Here is a screenshot of what I am seeing.

http://www.lvwnet.com/paragon/backup-capsule-bootscreen.jpg

Any ideas? Could this possibly be a feature of the BIOS on my system I haven't seen before?

BTW I tried making an MSDOS startup floppy disk and having that handy when I booted. I pressed F2 and got nothing, it didn't even try to read the floppy disk. (if it matters, doubtful, it was a USB floppy drive which is a known-good/working device).

cheers,
24junkie

 

Almost certainly a Paragon problem. Seems this is/was a known issue with Paragon and Win7 and should have been sorted a long time ago.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=265146
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=263658
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=258650

It’s hard to believe that this is not fixed yet so it may be Grub that is not helping. I’d try replacing the MBR and starting over without the dual boot to see if it is a Paragon and Win7 issue. If it is then personally I’d try replacing the MBR with an XP one (Vista and Seven don’t mind this if you are not using BitLocker). If that cures it then try putting Grub back on. If it is Grub screwing things up then your only option would be to use a boot manager that does not alter the MBR. Either one you run from a floppy/CD/USB or even the Windows one you already have on the System Reserved partition - which can be made to boot Linux.

Later
Bill

 

flumaxed wow thanks for the posts. I did search the forums here but didn't find those. I should have probably searched with a few more search terms rather than "backup capsule", "backup capsule boot" etc.

Now what else annoys me here is that supposedly the Backup and Recovery 10 Suite "fully supports Windows 7". That's what their website claims, anyway. Maybe what remains of this for me IS GRUB-specific, if so I don't guess we could really blame Windows 7 or Paragon failing to fully support it. I'll try the things you suggested and a few other things too and maybe get to the bottom of it.

I'm not "locked in" to only being willing to use GRUB as a bootloader. I do sort of prefer it because its highly configurable, and because I use Linux a very high percentage of the time. But there are other options out there too.

Thanks again,
24junkie