This article describes how to proceed if you have faced a problem with building WinPE-based bootable media with one of the following products:

• Acronis Backup
• Acronis Disk Director
• Acronis Snap Deploy 5/6

Prerequisites

1. Make sure you have made the necessary preparations before building a bootable media based on Windows Preinstallation Environment with Acronis plug-in.

   For Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5: see web help WinPE-based bootable media

   Older products: click to expand

    

   For Acronis Backup and Recovery see web-help: Preparation: WinPE 2.x and 3.x and Preparation: WinPE 4.0 and WinPE 5.0. WinPE 5.0, based on Windows 8.1 is supported only starting from the build 38350.
   For Acronis Disk Director see the user guide (Finding User Guides of Acronis Products), section 7.1.1.2/8.1.1.2 Adding the Acronis Plug-in to WinPE 2.x or 3.0. Note that WinPE 4 and 5 are based on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 respectively, and these operating systems are not supported by Acronis Disk Director yet. You cannot create a WinPE 4 or 5 - based bootable media with Acronis Disk Director. Note that WinPE versions older than WinPE 3.0 are not supported.

   If you use PE for Windows 10: note that since Windows 10, version 1809, Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) is released separately from the Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) (see here). Both files need to be installed to create WinPE-media.

2. Follow correct procedure. See
   Acronis Backup & Recovery: Using Acronis Media Builder to Build WinPE with Acronis Plug-In
   Acronis Backup 11.7/11.5: How to Create a WinPE Bootable Media with ADK (PE 4.0 or PE 5.0) for Windows 8/8.1
   Acronis Disk Director 11: Creating WinPE-Based Acronis Bootable Media
   ASD WinPE-based bootable media creation
   Creating WinPE with Windows AIK/ADK (for adding Acronis Plug-in to the image later) follow the correct procedure:
   For WinPE4.0, WinPE5.0 see Mount and Modify an Image Using DISM
   For WinPE3.x and WinPE2.x see Add Drivers to an Offline Image by Using DISM
3. Make sure you have enough disk space. As WinPE media creation involves unpacking temporary files, at least 1.5 GB of free disk space is required on system partition prior to starting WinPE-based media creation.
4. Unlike Acronis Linux-based rescue media, WinPE-based media cannot be written directly from Media Builder wizard to a USB flash drive. In such case you need to save an ISO image of the media and then use a third-party utility, like ISOtoUSB to write that image to the flash pen drive. Choose FAT32 as file system for the USB stick and mark "Bootable" checkbox.

Troubleshooting

1. Sometimes it is necessary to run the WinPE Media Builder with elevated permissions. To do that, open Start menu - Acronis, right-click "Bootable Media Builder", select "Run as administrator" and repeat media creation attempt.
2. If you add custom drivers and then media building fails, try creating WinPE-based media without injecting any custom drivers. If media is created successfully this way, verify that the drivers you tried to add corresponded to the Windows AIK/ADK version.
3. If you have chosen to use custom WinPE source files and the Media Builder does not recognize them, make sure you indicate the correct folder. For AIK 3.0 it is <path to extracted WinPE files>\ISO, for ADK it is <path to extracted WinPE files>\media. For example, if you have installed ADK for Windows 8 or 8.1 and extracted WinPE files using the command "copype x86 c:\winpe_x86", the folder you should indicate in WinPE Media Builder is C:\winpe_x86\media.
4. In rare occasions if creating bootable media on СD, .iso or .wim Bootable Media Builder wizard may finish with an error, while the media is successfully created.
   
   In such case you can safely use just created media. The issue is specific to the wizard itself and the resulted rescue media is not affected.

If the issue persists, please collect the following diagnostic information and contact Acronis Support.

Collect information

1. Step-by-step screenshots of your actions before the problem occurred;
2. System Report with AcronisInfo Utility;
3. In case of application crash of the media builder wizard, follow instructions from Troubleshooting Application Crashes to collect a crash dump of the MediaBuilder.exe process (e.g. run command prompt as administrator, run the command "procdump.exe -e -w -ma MediaBuilder.exe" and reproduce the problem);
4. Indicate whether there were other versions of Acronis software installed on the computer previously.