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Problem Doing Restore from External Drive

Problem Doing Restore from External Drive

Postby bbarry » Thu Mar 26, 2009 5:00 am

My IDE hard drive containing Vista-32 crashed, so I replaced it with a new one. The Acronis image that I want to restore is contained on an external USB drive. Both high-speed USB and Legacy USB are enabled in the BIOS.

The problem is that when I connect the external drive, the booting process hangs up (I can't even get back into BIOS Setup at that point). If I disconnect the external drive, all is well and I can boot into Acronis. But then of course, Acronis can't see my external drive where the backup image is located.

Any suggestions as to what I can do to enable my USB external drive connection? Thanks.........
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Re: Problem Doing Restore from External Drive

Postby JabbaPapa » Thu Mar 26, 2009 7:15 am

Hmmmm that all may be symptomatic of a problem with your motherboard :(

But maybe someone who knows Acronis inside out will have some suggestions --- I myself tend to be happy with Windows Easy Transfer, or even just Explorer for my own backups, so I'm not the person to ask :)

But it's *possible* that errors on the motherboard may have caused both the original hard drive crash and Acronis' failure to start up the external HDD ...
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Re: Problem Doing Restore from External Drive

Postby imnuts » Thu Mar 26, 2009 9:48 am

I would check to see what the boot order is set to when the external drive is plugged in. It could be that the swap of the hard drive changed the default boot order and is causing your system to try and boot from the external rather than the internal drive or CD, so when it's not plugged in, it boots like it should normally do. And have you tried plugging in the external while acronis is loading?
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Re: Problem Doing Restore from External Drive

Postby bbarry » Thu Mar 26, 2009 12:45 pm

JabbaPapa wrote:Hmmmm that all may be symptomatic of a problem with your motherboard :(

But maybe someone who knows Acronis inside out will have some suggestions --- I myself tend to be happy with Windows Easy Transfer, or even just Explorer for my own backups, so I'm not the person to ask :)

But it's *possible* that errors on the motherboard may have caused both the original hard drive crash and Acronis' failure to start up the external HDD ...

I'm the one who caused my original hard drive to crash. I was using Partiton Commander to resize/merge some partitons on this drive, and in the final stages the drive became unbootable. I have enclosed this drive in an external USB case and connected it to another computer. Then using Vista Disk Management I can see all the contents of the drive, and all looks well. I just don't know how to make it bootable again. So that's why I installed a new hard drive and am attempting to restore an Acronis image.

How do you make a drive partition bootable again if the OS/file/folders are still there?
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Re: Problem Doing Restore from External Drive

Postby bbarry » Thu Mar 26, 2009 12:50 pm

imnuts wrote:I would check to see what the boot order is set to when the external drive is plugged in. It could be that the swap of the hard drive changed the default boot order and is causing your system to try and boot from the external rather than the internal drive or CD, so when it's not plugged in, it boots like it should normally do. And have you tried plugging in the external while acronis is loading?

The boot order is CD/DVD drive, new hard drive, floppy drive. Since my external drive is USB, I don't even see it listed in the boot priority - should I? I have tried plugging in the external while Acronis is loading, but then Acronis can't see the drive.
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Re: Problem Doing Restore from External Drive

Postby Grav!ty » Thu Mar 26, 2009 12:55 pm

If you have the drive that caused you to be unable to boot previously, in the USB enclosure, it still will not be able to boot or be read by the BIOS. The fact that it is now in a USB enclosure does not change the fact that the BIOS needs to be able to read it's identifiers and that does not seem to be possible from what you say.
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Re: Problem Doing Restore from External Drive

Postby bbarry » Thu Mar 26, 2009 1:23 pm

Grav!ty wrote:If you have the drive that caused you to be unable to boot previously, in the USB enclosure, it still will not be able to boot or be read by the BIOS. The fact that it is now in a USB enclosure does not change the fact that the BIOS needs to be able to read it's identifiers and that does not seem to be possible from what you say.

I understand that just because I can read the "sick" drive while in the enclosure, this still doesn't mean that the BIOS can read it.

But does that mean that since I screwed up and made my Vista partition on this drive no longer bootable, that I can never make it bootable again? Is there nothing I can do to repair the boot sector on this drive?
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Re: Problem Doing Restore from External Drive

Postby Grav!ty » Thu Mar 26, 2009 2:35 pm

Try entering the HDD parameters into the BIOS manually if your BIOS allows for that option. You'll find the info you need on the case surface of the drive. It should look something like LBA 1569570488, 45987 Cylinders, 32 Heads, 126 Sectors, 78,000,235 Addressable Sectors. If it's not on the case of the HDD you should be able to find the info at the site of the manufacturer if you search for the model and make. With that info added to the BIOS, hopefully it will stop searching for the info and boot with the drive plugged into the USB enclosure and your system.

If that doesn't work, then that info has probably been erased and the drive is probably useless. The only other alternative would be to get the drive to a data recovery company who probably would have special tools or remove the platters and put them in another HDD case...that can prove really expensive so I wouldn't suggest that unless you have critical data on the drive that you don't mind paying a lot of money for.
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