Knowledge Base

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

Symptoms

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

Cause

The most probable cause is that a third party software is blocking the access to hard disk drives.

Solution

If you are using Acronis True Image or Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, check if the disks are detected in file/folder backup (or My Data in Acronis True Image Home 2009) as opposed to full disk/partition backup mode (or My Computer in Acronis True Image Home 2009).

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), then these symptoms indicate that the drives might not contain a valid MBR and therefore are not supported. Support for such drives without MBR is planned for future versions. The solution is to rebuild the drives or reinitialize RAID and create new partitions on them.

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.

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

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 Does Not Support Dynamic Disks or Disks with GUID Partition Tables (GPT)

More information

If the issue persists, please do the following:

1. Get Windows System Information File;
2. Get Acronis Report;
3. Contact Acronis Customer Central with reference to this article and all collected information.