When restoring, during "reboot" phase, Acronis messes up & I'm dead in the water.

When I chose to go ahead and restore my computer to a previous image I'd made, during the "reboot" phase - by this I mean when I've clicked "Yes" to the "Do you want to reboot" question and it goes to the limbo between machine startup and OS startup - something happens and the restore process is interrupted. I then get a "NTLDR is missing press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" and I absolutely cannot resume the restore.

Not only that, but once the restore process has begun, I'm guessing it just wipes out everything you have in terms of harddrive OS partitions, making it impossible to do anything except insert the manufacturer's recovery disk, install the OS, re-install Acronis, and try to restore again?

Am I not correct in assuming this? Is there any way in the world to resume an interrupted image restore? I've tried using the "Bootable Rescue Media" method but since there is no harddrive with an OS on it, there's nothing to restore my image to!

This has happened once before. Extremely inconvenient. I'm hoping against hope that I'm just missing something.

Edit: I haven't included my computer make/model nor my Acronis version because I did not think they were relevant and was trying very hard to keep this post as short as possible. I will include them if needed.

 

It is best to make an Acronis boot CD first, then boot from it when you do backups, and even more important to do this when you restore.

This way your computer doesn't have to deal with Windows being open and files in use. There are far less things that can go wrong.

I had TI ver 10 and the boot cd was giving problems and I couldn't use it. I downloaded the ver 2009 trial version onto a different computer and made a boot CD with it. I then used this cd on my TI ver 10 computer and it worked just fine. I now own TI ver 2009 and it works fine too.

I sometines do backup images from Windows XP but never do a restore that way, always from the boot CD.

Fungus

 

Thanks, I'll try to start doing that, however:

I found that my original OS installation was NOT, in fact, deleted. I had to hard-reset my computer after exhausting all other options and Vista started just fine, as though I had never tried to restore in the first place.

Realizing all was not lost, I tried to restore in the same exact way as before, making sure to watch the screen more carefully this time. What happened was once the screen came up that usually shows the progress bar of how far along the restoration process is, after about 3 minutes, the screen goes blank, I see for a SPLIT second some DOS-looking text, (all my brain could "see" were the words "...timed out..." I think), and the computer instantly restarts, then giving me the 'NTLDR is missing...' message. I can only get it to restart to Vista when I hard-reset at this point by holding the on/off button down until it shuts off.

I then tried to restore from a boot CD I made. This also didn't work. After selecting the file I wanted to restore from, it asks me to select the drive I wanted to restore onto, (happens to be my C: drive), and then it asks what seems like the exact same question in the next window, only in different words, and my harddrive where I have my images stored shows up as the ONLY drive to restore to AND it's also named C:!!! I know this is NOT where I want to restore, but I decided to select it and try to continue anyway, just to see what would happen, and it gives me the "cannot restore to the same drive where your image is saved..." message.

What in the world gives? I'm starting to wonder if this computer just isn't cut out for Acronis.

It's an HP G60-231WM notebook running Vista Home Premium, almost brand-new! I'm using Acronis TI Home v 11.0 build 8,053 -the updated versions are too confusing and user-unfriendly for me right now.

 

Do a search and determine what the path is to your backup file. If it on your C drive, the error message is correct. If on the other hand, the search reveals that your *.tib file is located on another partition but on the same disk, then you are should choose to restore only the C partition and do not tick the disk option as your restore choice. The error message is determined by your choices and is factual.

If your *.tib files is truly located on the C drive, then you will have to copy it to an other disk (perhaps external) and use the other disk as the source for your backup file.

Use the TI Rescue CD as suggested by Fungus. Trying to restore your system from within Windows causes only grief.

Perhaps my guides below can help. Check line 2 of my signature below.

It helps if you have assigned meaningful names to your drives so you can identify by their names and their sizes. Making choices based on drive letters can cause lots of grief as the Rescue CD may assign drive letters differently as compared to Windows.

 

Actually, I've been using Acronis to re-image my 4 main computers at least once per month (from within Windows) for well over a year now with no problems. This is a foreign computer (a relative's) that I've never tried to restore before and it's the first time I've run into this problem. It's also the first time I've ever tried re-imaging via a boot disk rather than within Windows. So far, for me, restoration via boot disk is the way that's causing me most grief. I won't turn my back on it, though.

I would never save my backup files on the same physical drive as the one I want to re-image. I know where I save them (i.e. I don't have to search for them) and it's always onto an external harddrive. I have no clue why both drives were showing up as C: - they are physically separate drives, not even partitions. My backup files were only accessible through a USB cord to my external HDD.

The error message was legit. In fact, I was expecting it. It's just at that point, I was trying anything and everything to try to get a different response out of the program.

I am extremely familiar with Acronis, so my ability to use it is not the issue. I've used it on many, many other computers besides my main 4 with no problems that I haven't been able to fix before. This specific issue I'm having - with the progress screen that blanks out and the glitchy-looking "timed out" message that followed - seemed so completely out-of-the-ordinary for what I'm used to with Acronis that I decided to ask others about it. Please don't think I'm a silly first-timer who doesn't know what she's talking about. Acronis backup & restore is like muscle memory for me now and I could probably do it in my sleep. I'm genuinely concerned about this issue since I'm so used to Acronis acting so perfectly all the time.

Thanks for directing me to your links. I'll take a look at them.

 

My view only:
I have never encountered any problems resulting from imaging within Windows or starting a restore from within Windows. Even if you start the restore of the active partition within Windows the reboot loads the Linux rescue environment from HD and it is darn close to the same as on the rescue CD.

I would say that the problem described in this post is a Linux issue with the PC hardware and doing things with the rescue CD is unlikely to make it better although it will likely confirm the problem.

The other thing that might be done is a chkdsk /r on all the partitions in case there is a filesystem error that is causing a problem but I doubt it.

I accept that making an image with the rescue CD is probably a bit safer than doing it within Windows but imaging within Windows is not a significant source of problems with TI.

 

This sounds to me like the Linux recovery environment is unable to recognize the hard disk (probably SATA) in your relative's new laptop; and probably because the laptop has a chipset newer than the versions supported by TI 11. And whether you start the restore from Windows or from the boot CD, the internal disk MUST be supported (obviously) for the restore to work.

Here are three things to try:

1. Look in the BIOS settings for an "IDE Compatibility Mode" setting. If you have one, set it to compatibility mode. The Linux recovery environment is almost certain to support IDE disks.
2. Download the trial version of TI 2009 and install it on a test computer. Use it to make a boot CD. The 2009 boot CD may contain the correct drivers for your SATA chipset, so you could use it to restore images made with TI 11. That, however, leaves out the possibility of starting a restore from Windows.
3. Contact Acronis support and see if they can provide you an ISO image file of TI 11 that contains the driver support that the laptop needs.

 

seekforever and k0lo:

Thanks a lot for your very insightful and intriguing suggestions. Unfortunately, my uncle left our family vacation home a couple of days ago and I probably won't have access to his computer for a few more years as I'm off to grad school this fall.

I wish I could have tried those suggestions - I had no idea the problem could go as deep as that, especially after having worked with so many computers that run the program flawlessly.

I'm almost tempted now to put Acronis on all the computers I can get my hands on to see if I can recreate the problem. I'll try to resist...but if I can't, I'll be sure to share my results.