Restore using Acronis on UEFI system- what the manual doesn't tell you

cyanna · 25 Aug 2014

Installed windows 7 on UEFI computer. Installed Acronis and created image and bootable media. Booted from bootable media and tested that the restoration process actually works. So far so good.
Fast forward 6 months: drive fails. Buy new drive, install, boot from Acronis bootable media, find archive used during initial test, verify archive, go through the prompt to recover image and....Recovery failed.
I have spent eight hours of my life trying to fix this! It turns out that Acronis doesn't know how to prepare a disk for GPT

So for all other people out there using Acronis: restore operations are no problem if you restore to the same disk without cleaning/deleting partitions/reformatting. If however you do any of those things or if you have to restore to a new drive you have to first boot into something that can run diskpart. In diskpart you need to select the drive then convert to GPT. Now reboot from Acronis media and restore.......

fireberd · 25 Aug 2014

I used to use Acronis True Image. I now use Macrium Reflect (paid version) and much better and easier. With Acronis creating a WinPE rescue disc is a manual process (that I had to do because the Linux version wouldn't run on two PC's I had - both Z77 motherboards with UEFI BIOS). With Macrium, its automated, including downloading WinPE.

jimbo45 · 30 Aug 2014

Hi there

Latest copy of Acronis doesn't have probs with GPT - but you can always download either a Live Linux CD or GPARTED to create / format GPT drive.

IMO using WINPE is a total pain --It's just easier to simply use Linux or GPARTED !!!

GPARTED will format in GPT

Using the New GUID Partition Table in Linux (Goodbye Ancient MBR) | Linux.com-

Actually if you are comfortable with LINUX you can clone partitions quite easily with the DD command too - but it's easier using a decent backup program especially if copying / imaging to / from different sized partitions.

Cheers
jimbo

Anshad Edavana · 30 Aug 2014

Actually if you are comfortable with LINUX you can clone partitions quite easily with the DD command too - but it's easier using a decent backup program especially if copying / imaging to / from different sized partitions.

That is true in case of MBR disks but GPT is whole another story. To clone a GPT disk to another one (sector by sector copy), not only the total capacity but the total number of LBA numbers should also match. This is because of the backup partition table which should be present on the very last sector of a GPT disk. So if you copy a 500 GB GPT disk to 750 one using "dd" or "ddrescue", the last sector of the 750 GB disk won't contain the backup partition table and hence Windows won't detect any partitions. Of course an advanced user can always fix this by hand but an intelligent imaging program like "Macrium" will automatically take care of this.

jimbo45 · 30 Aug 2014

Anshad Edavana said:

Actually if you are comfortable with LINUX you can clone partitions quite easily with the DD command too - but it's easier using a decent backup program especially if copying / imaging to / from different sized partitions.

That is true in case of MBR disks but GPT is whole another story. To clone a GPT disk to another one (sector by sector copy), not only the total capacity but the total number of LBA numbers should also match. This is because of the backup partition table which should be present on the very last sector of a GPT disk. So if you copy a 500 GB GPT disk to 750 one using "dd" or "ddrescue", the last sector of the 750 GB disk won't contain the backup partition table and hence Windows won't detect any partitions. Of course an advanced user can always fix this by hand but an intelligent imaging program like "Macrium" will automatically take care of this.

Hi there
You can overcome this with zillions of parameters - If one isn't decently familiar with Linux then DD is quite hard to use properly.

Most Linux distros have ZERO problem with GPT - the partitions are identified by a GUUID. DD can use noseq, noerror etc etc so the last sector problem isn't always an issue --you have to be aware of the possible problem of course.

Actually you can use freebies like CLONEZILLA / FILEZILLA if you want to use Linux for partition cloning - or even GPARTED itself.

I agree though a decent robust backup piece of software is always better.

Cheers
jimbo

cyanna · 30 Aug 2014

Perhaps I should have specified: the problem and resolution described in my first post were encountered using Acronis True Image 2014 Premium, build 6673. I was not aware there was a newer one?