Restore from Acronis TrueImage hangs, won’t finish

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I wasn’t sure what forum this was best posted in. I tried to do a restore from an Acronis image on a USB external hard drive. The process seemed to be going fine, until the status screen got to 5 minutes left … aaaaand the program hung there and refused to progress for over an hour. No disk activity, nothing happening at all. I couldn’t cancel and get out, it just ignored me. Finally had to kill power to get it to shut down.

I’m a newbie to TrueImage and to imaging programs in general, no idea where to start (and I’ve been up far too late tonight fussing with this). Any hints?

Thanks,

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You’re in the correct forum. I’ve never had this happen, so a question or two if I may? It sounds like the hard drive on your machine is bad or failing. Then too, it could be some other “hardware” related problem. I don’t think it’s the TI image or you would most likely have gotten an error message to that effect. Did the drive you’re trying to restore have a crash – is that why you’re restoring? You might need to run some kind of diagnostics on that drive. When you boot the machine, can you jump in to the BIOS and “look around” to make sure something hasn’t gotten changed and if the hard drive is recognized properly?

Edited to add: Oops, I had not looked in Hardware, so I didn’t know the post had been moved (Hans’ comment below). Well, NOW it’s in the correct forum.

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I moved this thread from Hardware to Software Finds and Wants because it seemed to be primarily about Acronis True Image. If necessary, it can be moved back.

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As I said, up WAY too late last night. Thanks!

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I have TWO hard drives, one of which is failing (it’s not quite dead yet), one of which I’ve always used for backing up files. I purchased an external drive for backups, and am trying to turn the old backup drive into the main drive for this machine. So I was trying to restore to the “backup” drive.

To head off the question … yes, I saw there is an option to clone the drive, which may be a more obvious (maybe also more sensible) thing to do. But this is my first chance to test restoring from an image, so that’s why I tried it. Would kind of like to be sure the software I’m depending on for backups will work when I need it (and now I’m glad I tried it, before it’s an emergency)

I don’t have time to poke around in BIOS, etc. right now, will have to come back to it later. I have very little experience so far in working with hardware setup, BIOS setup, restore images, and so on, so I’m trying to treat this as a “learning experience” (instead of a “pain in the rear-end” experience )

Thanks!

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Let me take a stab at this and share what I think is correct.

1) You cannot restore an image on an external drive to that same drive UNLESS you are restoring the image to a partition on that drive other than the one where the backup image(s) are stored. The reason why this won’t work should be obvious…. the Restoration process wipes/formats the drive before restoring the image. Thus, the image you want to use to restore would be deleted before it could be used to restore.

2) Unless your PC is capable of booting from an external USB device, the drive you restored the image too would have to be installed internally afterward. You would have to install it as Master and your failing drive as Slave, unless of course, they are both SATA drives in which case this would not apply. You do realize that if you keep the old drive connected, you will end up with a dual-boot situation, something which you probably don’t want. In that case, you will need to remove the old drive before booting up again.

3) Cloning would be the preferred choice, IMHO, for what you are wanting to do. You would thus install your external drive internally, again setting the jumper on the replacement drive to Slave if it is an IDE drive, and run the clone wizard. Upon completion, you would SHUT DOWN the PC, REMOVE, or at least unplug the data cable and power plug from the old drive, reset the jumper on the new drive to Master, etc., and then turn on the PC.

I would strongly encourage you to read through the Manual/Help on how to clone a drive. It is actually quite easy and it doesn’t take very long at all to actually do a clone. I’ve done several and I am always amazed at how quickly it is done, e.g., about 10 minutes in most cases. But then again, the drives I have cloned have only had about 12 gigs or less used space. YMMV.

Jeff

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Whoops. I have not done a very good job of explaining my situation! Apologies, I was in too much of a hurry this morning to make myself clear. Take two:

Old setup was two internal drives. The primary drive is failing, BUT still working. The second drive was for backing up the primary drive. The plan is to turn the “second” drive into the “new primary” drive.

I purchased an external USB hard drive, and used TrueImage to make a full backup onto it from the primary (failing, but still working!) drive. I did realize that I would lose all the data on the second drive by restoring to it!

Last evening, I disconnected the primary drive, set up the second drive in its place, and tried to restore to it from the USB drive. Which seemed to work, until the status screen got down to five minutes left … and hung.

When I get home tonight, I will check the BIOS to see if the drive is recognized — this is getting into unfamiliar territory for me, but I at least know how to get in and look. Though if the drive was not recognized, why would the whole restore process seem to run, and only hang at the end? It seems to me that it should not have been able to start in the first place.

I may yet fall back on cloning the drive in order to get the machine running again, but I would still like to test the restore function to make sure it works in case I ever need it. Results so far have not been encouraging (but I’m not blaming the software yet, at this point it’s just as likely I messed something up). If I use the cloning feature to get the machine working, is there any way I can set things up to test a restore, without taking the chance of turning a functional machine into a non-functional one if it doesn’t go well?

Thanks,

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I think the operative word here is “failing.” You should never do a backup, image or otherwise, without first running CHKDSK C: /R to first make sure the drive is stable and not corrupt. If you have done that, I think at this point you SHOULD try to clone the primary drive to the backup drive. Then of course, you will have to do some hardware manipulation with physical unhooking and re-jumpering the drives to put the cloned drive into the primary position to see if it will boot. My primary concern here is that that backup you have on an external drive might be corrupt.

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All right. I ran chkdsk and then proceeded with cloning, which went very smoothly and quickly. After some fumbling around with cables and jumpers, the old drive is out, and the cloned one is up and running. All appears to be well, though I’ll check things out more carefully tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for your help!

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