These Things Are A Headache
I wasted an evening trying to get either an Acronis recovery CD, or, USB stick to boot…..ugh. I tried the following versions (as I recall):
- 16
- 17
- and 18
I was using on old HP EliteDesk computer. I could never get one of these damned things to work…to boot to a working screen.
On boot there would be a dos-style menu, I would choose ‘Acronis Recovery’ (or some such option), it would say “Loading’ in the upper left and then nothing.
The Big Issue: Secure Boot Settings in BIOS
The fix, thanks to Claude.ai, was to jack around with the ‘secure boot’ settings in the BIOS. In a nutshell, the BIOS had to be set to the following…..which it was not:
With this configured in this way both CD and USB sticks booted. These Acronis recovery disks are extremely fussy….overly fussy in my opinion.
HOWEVER: With the above configuration Linux would NOT boot and threw some sort of kernel loading error. This may be because Linux was installed with the configuration below – anyway, the settings below were required for Linux to boot properly (on my install):
TIB vs. TIBX
Acronis switched from .tib to .tibx starting with version 2020 (version 24). So your versions 14, 16, and 17 all use .tib, and version 18 would be right on the cusp — I believe 18 still used .tib primarily, with .tibx arriving shortly after.
The reasons for the switch were:
- Better compression — .tibx uses a more efficient compression algorithm
- Faster backups — the new format supports parallel processing during backup
- Improved reliability — better error recovery and corruption resistance
- Cloud integration — designed to work better with Acronis Cloud storage
- Encryption improvements — stronger encryption built into the format itself
And these formats are incompatible in one direction: older versions cannot read .tibx files at all. A machine running Acronis 2017 cannot restore from a .tibx backup made with Acronis 2021.
However: The newer versions can still read the old .tib format for backward compatibility – it’s a one-way street but better than nothing. The good news is that newer versions are backward compatible.
This caught a lot of people off guard – they’d upgrade Acronis, make new backups in .tibx, then find they couldn’t restore them from a boot CD running an older version. Which may actually be part of your boot CD problem — if any of those CDs are the newer versions using .tibx there could be additional compatibility layers complicating things.