Knowledge Base

If Acronis product reports that it has not found any hard disks in Windows, the issue is probably in third party software blocking access to hard disks

(!) If the issue is with Acronis Bootable Media, please see Acronis Bootable Media Does Not Detect HDD, RAID or NIC.

(!) If the issue is with Windows 2000 machine, make sure it has been rebooted after the Acronis product installation. For Windows 2000, reboot is required in order for the product to function properly.

(!) If you are looking for information on NAS backup, please see:

• Backing Up to NAS
• Backing Up a NAS Unit

Symptoms

When running an Acronis product in Windows, it cannot find any hard disk drives.

Or Acronis Backup & Recovery Disk Management identifies the problem drive as Super floppy or Unsupported:

Cause

The most probable cause is that the problem drive does not have a valid MBR or a third party software is blocking the access to hard disk drives.

Solution

(!) Acronis Disk Director 11 Home, Acronis Disk Director 11 Advanced and Acronis True Image Home Plus Pack support GPT disks.

If you are using Acronis True Image or Acronis Backup & Recovery, check if the disks are detected in file/folder backup (or My Data in Acronis True Image Home 2010, or File backup in Acronis True Image Home 2011) as opposed to full disk/partition backup mode (or My Computer in Acronis True Image Home 2010, or Disk and partition backup in Acronis True Image Home 2011).

Follow the instructions below:

• If the disks are not detected either in full disk/partition backup mode, or in file/folder backup mode
• If the disks are detected in file/folder backup mode, but not in disk/partition backup mode

Disks are not detected

If the disks are detected neither in full disk/partition backup mode, nor in file/folder backup mode, then check the following:

1. If there is any non-Acronis backup software installed, try temporarily disabling it. See if this resolves the issue. Please also take a look at Compatibility of Acronis Products with HP Backup and Recovery;
2. If there is any antivirus software, try temporarily disabling it. See if this resolves the issue;
3. Download and install Acronis driver update:
   • Acronis backup & Recovery 10/11: SnapAPI 640
   • Acronis True Image Home 2012: SnapAPI 685
   • Acronis True Image Home 2010/2011: SnapAPI 586
   • Other Acronis products: SnapAPI 380

(!) You will need to reboot the machine to finish the installation.

If you are using Acronis Backup & Recovery, you can circumvent the reboot requirement by restarting the Acronis Managed Machine Service:

Disks are detected in file/folder backup mode only

If the disks are detected in file/folder backup mode and the drives contain only one partition, which fills the entire disk (this can be seen from Disk Management via Start-Run -> diskmgmt.msc), then these symptoms indicate that the drives might not contain a valid MBR (which is often the case with the new drives formatted by the disk vendor) and therefore are not supported. Support for such drives without MBR is planned for future versions. The solution is to reinitialize drives from scratch and ensure proper MBR is created on them:

(!) Please note that all the data from such disk is to be transferred to some other location not on this drive, since the below actions will erase all the data from the disk in question.

• Hit Start-Run and type in cmd
• In the command line, type in diskpart
• Issue the following commands:

  list disk

  

  -> and locate the number of the problem disk (let us consider the problem disk is Disk 1).

  select disk 1

  

  -> this will select Disk 1 as the target, and diskpart will run further operations with this disk.

  clean

  

  -> this will erase all disk formatting and overwrite the existing MBR with zeroes to make the disk uninitialized.

• Then go to Disk Management (Start-Run -> diskmgmt.msc) and initialize the problem disk:

  

See also:

• Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Does Not Detect Hard Disks after Installation of Acronis Disk Director 10.0
• Acronis True Image Echo Hangs or Does Not Detect Multipath Devices in Windows Server 2008
• Acronis True Image Home Does Not Support Dynamic Disks or Disks with GUID Partition Tables (GPT)
• Acronis Disk Director 10.0 Does Not Support Dynamic Disks or Disks with GUID Partition Tables (GPT)
• Acronis Backup & Recovery 10: USB Device Detection Fails after the Product Installation

More information

If the issue persists, please do the following:

1. Get AcronisInfo Utility;
2. Screenshot your Windows Disk Management (Start-Run -> diskmgmt.msc). See also Creating Screenshots;
3. Contact Acronis Customer Central with reference to this article and all collected information.