I'm trying to help a friend of my set up a back up procedure using Acronis True Image Home. His system is a Lenovo A-730 AIO running Win 8.1 64-Bit. I had him buy an external USB 3.0 1TB hard drive and an enclosure, so we didn't have to deal with the build in encryption hassles of the skinny external USB drives. He got the drive, and enclosure and set up a weekly directory structure to copy the files from My Documents to the external USB hard drive. That went fine, no problems. In addition to the File Copy I wanted to create monthly image of the entire system, so I had him buy a copy of Acronis 2015 and after it was installed, we made an Bootable DVD from an ISO created by Acronis. The reason for creating the DVD is that I'm not keen on running Acronis from within Windows, so booting from a DVD takes Windows out of the loop. After a shut down and restart, and some fiddling to figure out what Lenovo called the DVD drive, Acronis started up and we stepped through the screens to get to where Acronis asked to save the image. When Browse was selected for a location to save the file, the USB drive was not listed. We went through the monkey drill of Shutdown/Restart but no matter what, the USB drive didn't show up. Unfortunately my friend is in a couple of states away, and we are trying to do this over the phone, and Teamviewer, but I can't run Teamviewer and Acronis so I have to take his word for what he says is happening. Although he's no expert he's pretty anal, and if he says the external drive isn't there, I can be pretty sure that it isn't. So I was wondering if maybe Acronis couldn't backup to an external USB drive. I attached an external USB 3.0 hard drive to my Dell Windows 7 and booted off my Acronis 2013 DVD. It showed the USB drive as Disk 2 which would be impossible to miss. I searched Acronis and Lenovo's support forum for a solution and I couldn't find any mention of my problem. The closest I could come was that the USB drivers are loaded as part of the UEFI boot sequence in Windows 8.1 and without them the external USB drive would not be visible as it is in my Dell Win 7 system that has the USB drivers in the BIOS. There was mention that no drivers could be loaded or added to the Acronis Boot media, so if this is the case, I guess we are SOL. BTW, the external USB drive is visible in Win 8.1 no problem, and he can copy files to it without any problems. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks,
have him boot into the bios and set a delay in the boot time. Could very well be the enclosure+drive isn't picked up fast enough for the fast boot methods. I've had to give a 5 second boot delay for older 1TB drives. Might be worth trying. I agree as well, I will not backup anything within windows. One big factor out of the loop for sure.
The DVD that Acronis built, is it WinPE based? If it's WinPE 4 then you probably need to add USB3 drivers to it. Perhaps when building this iso there's an option to add drivers. Does the AIO have USB2 ports? If so, try the drive on that, it'll work (but slower of course).
No it's Linux based, and there's no way to add drivers, at least, that I know of. Good suggestion. It might make a difference. I'm pretty sure there are USB 2.0 ports but I'm not positive. If there are, I'll give it a shot and see what happens.
Get your m8 to download EFA11's build of Acronis. Looks to be built by ADK 8.1 so will natively support USB3. Thanks EFA11!!!