Acronis backup and recovery

[plexer]

Anyone have any experience with this lovely s/w?

 

My current employer uses it for imaging and restoring whole images to machines.

 

I used it absolutely fine last week on half a dozen dekstops but now trying to do the same with some laptops and it's not working.

 

I boot up from either the Linux based media or winpe it doesn't matter select the disk image to restore from a portable hard drive and then go to pick the internal disk I want to restore to but everytime I get an error "the disk is already occupied", I wiped and reformatted the target disk no difference, I can capture an image from the machine and I tried doing that and then immediately to redeploy it and the same error.

 

Acronis tech support are no help.

 

Other ideas?

 

Ben

[win]

I've seen this with similar cloning software (not acronis). Surprisingly the solution was to simply unplug the USB cable and put it into another USB port. Not sure if that will work for you but worth trying.

[plexer]

I've tried several different machines and different usb ports at the moment.

 

I'm wondering if the laptops can't supply enough juice and I meant to bring in a powered hub with me today but forgot will try that tomorrow.

 

Ben

[win]

If that fails, i recommend trying clonezilla. It's open source and does the same thing as acronis.

[e4e]

I had something simular with Acronis. And the easiest way I found to get it working was to take a windows media disk, delete all partitions then rerun the acronis boot disk and it will recreate all partitions.

[plexer]

If that fails, i recommend trying clonezilla. It's open source and does the same thing as acronis.

 

Thanks for the suggestion but at the moment I have existing Acronis images previously built by other IT staff for their desktop and laptop models, we're looking at SCCM at the moment but I may have to start looking at something for building machines although tbh I'd probably use PXE Server for Windows - Serva for a simple setup.

 

Ben

[zag]

Yep sounds like a power problem.

 

Try getting one of those dual cable USB leads. We use that for all our cloning.

[free780]

With 7/8 you have a driver neutral image so you don't need one for every model. When you restore the image is it from a server?

[plexer]

Nope it's usb dvd for pe boot and usb hard drive containing the images.

 

As I said before this is the current setup and worked fine for the desktops I did the other day at the moment I'm concerned with getting this method working on the laptops using the existing images that were capture and then when I get time I will be looking at alternatives.

 

Ben

[free780]

Are the laptops uefi?

[plexer]

Are the laptops uefi?

 

They are but it's disabled in the bios, solved it this morning well switching hard drive mode to ide from ahci has enabled it to work.

 

Ben

[mikkydoos]

1. Acronis is bleeding cack. So are their support. I've been lumped with it for ages. By my own doing funnily enough

 

2. What version is it? There's bugs in 9, 10 and probably 11 that I've worked around.

 

Delete all the partitions from the disk and don't format. The image will do that. Acronis server has Disk Director built in. You can do it with that straight off the boot disk.

[plexer]

Tried that.

 

I'm not using Trueimage 2015 although I haven't yet tried it with one of the particular ones that was giving me issues, will try tomorrow.

 

Ben

[mikkydoos]

I just deleted that post. Thought you'd solved it? No ?

[plexer]

No thought I had with setting the hard drive mode but that didn't work.

 

Trueimage 2015 winpe boot media is now restoring quite happily though.

 

Ben

[mikkydoos]

Acronis is picky with hardware. I presume its the SATA drivers within the Linux kernel. I've had many issues with NIC's not being detected or not working.

 

Not a good product. Try scheduling images from the installed Acronis. Major headache.