Acronis TI & DD Scripts for x64 & x86 PE Builds

After much amateurish fiddling (kindly assisted by inputs from Lancelot and JFX in another thread) I've finally come up with scripts for Acronis True Image (Home 2011) and Disk Director (v11) that support both x64 and x86 system architectures under Windows PE builds, including Windows 7.  I'm uploiading them here for whatever usage anyone wishes to make of them, including redistribution, modifications, or whatever.  No attributions are required for any purpose.

In fact, the "magic" is not so much in the scripts themselves as in the versioning, selection matching and proper destination placement of the files for the Acronis Snapshots Manager (snapman) and its DLL support.  This requires some rearrangements of and additions to the PE builder files that are supplied by Acronis in its TI "Plus Pack" or downloaded separately as the Acronis BartPE addon packages for TI and/or DD.  So please read the following carefully.

First and foremost, in order to support the x64 architecture in your PE builds, you will need the snapman.sys file and its version-matched snapapi.dll file from your own Windows x64 installation.  The corresponding files that are included in the Acronis "Plus Pack" or in the BartPE download will NOT support any x64 WinPE build at all.

Secondly, the folder tree arrangement for the files that are included in the Acronis "Plus Pack" and BartPE downloads is very poorly organized for any usage in WinPE building inasmuch as its subfolders do not correspond well with WinPE destination placements.  To use either or both of these scripts you MUST reorganize the structure of those Acronis source folders and files and, if they are to be used for x64 WinPE building, add the required drivers as follows:

1) Move the "Microsoft.VC80.CRT" subfolder out of the "Drivers" subfolder and make it directly subordinate to the main "files" folder that contains the application executable files from the Acronis "Plus Pack" or BartPE download.

2) Make a duplicate copy of the "Drivers" subfolder in a subfolder named "Drivers-x64" and then replace the snapman.sys and snapapi.dll files in that "Drivers-x64" subfolder with the version-matched files from the Acronis program installed under your own Windows x64 set-up.

3) The Iscsi subfolder and the A43 files that are included in some Acronis PE support downloads can be omitted completely, or just left in place as they are.  In any case, they are just ignored and NOT used at all by these scripts as they will normally be dealt with by their own separate WinPE builder scripts if selected for inclusion elsewhere in the WinPE build process.


Please note that Disk Director's own internal menu selection for starting the Acronis Recovery Expert utility does not work.  It never has in my own experience.  The Recovery Expert utility is fully functional, however, and the DD script does include a regular WinPE menu "shortcut" for its selection.

And a note about license keys:  These scripts do not include any, not even the ones that are widely available from the Acronis BartPE downloads.  You'll need to enter them yourself the first time that you run the scripts.  Or, alternatively, you can select the option to have them read in from the registry of the host machine on which the Acronis application has been installed.

Lastly, as with any newly created WinBuilder scripts, these will undoubtedly be found to include some imperfections.  Certainly their amateur "first draft" coding leaves plenty of room for improvements.  The author has, however, done as much testing of the end products as practicable within a short timeframe, including the validation of several True Image backups.  Nevertheless, these scripts are offered "as is" with the usual caveats that the author accepts no liability whatever for their usage or any consequences thereof.  USE THEM AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Regards to all
"Arvy"

POSSIBLE ISSUE:  Further testing suggests that the ability of Acronis products to handle REG_EXPAND_SZ registry entries for component paths may be highly inconsistent, even amongst various subversion updates released under the same product heading.  In the circumstances, it is probably safest to use RegAddBoot for ALL such component path entries regardless of the PE build level.   The attachment has been updated accordingly.  If you have already downloaded the original scripts, just comment out the relevant conditional  (If...End) lines and make the RegAddBoot section apply to all builds.

Hi Arvy,

Wow, that's quite a feat to get this working! Good job.

I've moved the topic here under the 'General Scripts' section and deleted your other topic in the Win7PE SE board (since as you say the script is not just for PE1 projects).

Regards,
Galapo.

Thank you very much, Galapo.  Once again, you've saved me from looking like a complete idiot in a public forum -- well, as much as anyone can save me from that fate. 

BTW, I've also posted this in the "other place" as I felt that all potential users should get equal treatment regardless of affiliation.

Glad to help!

I just noticed your recent post there (as a guest, since my login is refused until mid October). No issue there with me -- I've always been keen to help others, and glad to see you doing that too.

Regards,
Galapo.

POSSIBLE ISSUE:  Further testing suggests that the ability of Acronis products to handle REG_EXPAND_SZ registry entries for component paths may be highly inconsistent, even amongst various subversion update releases under the same product heading.  In the circumstances, it is probably safest to use RegAddBoot for ALL such component path entries regardless of the PE build level.   A revised upload is attached accordingly.

If you have already downloaded the original scripts, just comment out the relevant conditional  (If...End) lines and make the RegAddBoot section apply to all builds.

Thanks Arvy,

for these nice pe1/2/3-x86/x64  compatible Acronis scripts   
I am pretty sure many Acronis fans will love them 

I must admit I have not test them, not being at home-pc frequently, and when home not have much time, also not have acronis products at hand  But I will, even only for curiosity..... 

It's VERY sloppy coding, Lancelot.  They do work (for me at least) under both Gena and Win7PE SE x86 and x64 builds.  But if anyone looks at the internals, I'm sure they won't meet anyone's current script coding standards.  And they do also require a bit of fussing with the Acronis source set-up.

In a way, I was ashamed to share them in their current state, but I figured someone might sort out the sloppy internals and perhaps also make them easier to use without the bother of rearranging the Aconis source.  Anyhow, if they're of any use to anyone, please feel free to do anything you want with them.

A core script, being able to do the task, is what is needed to All Arvy 

To get end user use script more easly, is only cosmetics  and requires a bit more time, well to me some "fun" time, not having these days.......

Please keep providing scripts the way you like, as long as they are working scripts one would add cosmetics one day 

I used Norton Utilities for many years back in the (MS)DOS days and remained loyal for some time thereafter which did eventually lead me to using Norton Ghost for a while.  Peter Norton made some very fine utilities, but I don't think I'll ever forgive him for selling out to Symantec.  Things went downhill very rapidly after that IMO.  In fact, at this point, I'm not even sure that I'd classify Symantec products as utilities any longer -- more like bloated memory hogs in many cases.

But I'm not really very loyal to Acronis either.  It's just what I've been using for a while now, and switching one's primary backup and recovery apps isn't exactly a casual decision.

Nothing else that I've built for myself is likely to be very popular.  They're just scripts for some of my own favourites like UltraEdit, BeyondCompare and CoreFTP.  Basically, they just copy the installed files to the PE build and, in some cases, add a few registry lines for context menus.  Except CoreFTP (strictly a file copy process) the others require license keys as well as the app's actual installed files and so I doubt very much that they'd be useful to anyone but myself. In fact I'm using an older UltraEdit version just for PE builds 'cuz the latest is no longer portable.

I lost my sleep,

I %500 think same with your comments about norton 
I feel you are one of symantec's victim of ghost8 --- 11.0, switch to acronis 
Even I do not use (and not like) Acronis, I appreciate Acronis developers, awaking and filling the mistake symantec did/doing, with fully understand why people start and continue with Acronis 


I am not loyal to anyutility too,

switching one's primary backup and recovery apps isn't exactly a casual decision.

and agree in heart.


yep I understand your scripts  , I hope using "MyScripts" helped you to organise easly 

Hi

First of all congratulations you guys on Gena!
It is a real nice project

Unfortunately nowadays i haven't got much time for my hobby.

I write here to ask for some help since i do not want to start a new thread with  title like "MMM! HEY!    Why doesn't it work?!"

On an other forum someone asked for  an Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 script.
I have thought i write a nice universal  script - like Arvy's script - which can work across different projects
(in x86/x64 PE 1.x - x86 PE 2.x - x86/x64 PE 3.x, in  Gena / LiveXP / VistaPE CAPI v.12 / Win7PE_SE).
This script is intended to be an exact BartPE .inf port to .script. So it is not a 'full' version, only the  BartPE version.

Now i post this  Acronis script here.
For me at first see the script  seems to work but it is not tested seriously enough.
So i would like to ask you guys to test this script  - whether is it a useable script.

Also i have problem with x64 XP based PE1.x,  i.e. the app. cannot start at all
while seems to work fine in x64 Windows 7 based PE 3.x, e.g. in x64 Win7PE_SE.
Any idea why does this happen?

 AcronisBackupAndRecovery11_v5.7z (6.02 kB - downloaded 458 times.)
(This script needs ABR11 installed on the building host)

Nice to see you guys again!

Regards,
dera

Wish I could be more helpful, but never having "graduated" beyond Acronis' so-called "home" TI products to their big league backup and recovery enterprise stuff, I can't actually test it for you.  Just looking at the script itself, however, I can see where a problem might arise under some circumstances due to Acronis' unfortunately inconsistent support for the use of environment variables for locating components.  In many cases, their products can't even handle %SystemDrive% as a component locator, let alone anything else.

I see that you have very carefully followed all of the individual file copy entries in their BartPE acronis.inf script; so there should be no problems at all in that area.  (I was lazier and just re-organized things so I could use DirCopy for everything except the snapman.sys and snapapi.dll files.)  So, if you're running into problems, I would suggest looking very carefully at your use of reg_add versus RegAddBoot for different builds, keeping in mind that you just can't depend on Acronis stuff to handle REG_EXPAND_SZ (0x2) stuff consistently -- not even for their subversion update releases.

I was almost tearing my hair out by the time I got mine working.  Hope you have better luck, and happy scripting.   

I was almost tearing my hair out by the time I got mine working.  Hope you have better luck, and happy scripting.

Thanks for your words!
(all i can say "Acronis script sux!":)

if enyone intersted in
please do feedback

Regards,
dera

(all i can say "Acronis script sux!":)

And the organization of their PE packages sux even worse.  If their PE package arrangement of files and folders had some more sensible relationship to their intended destinations in PE builds, about 90% of their scripting of all that individual file copying wouldn't be necessary at all. 

Based on my own experience, dera, for whatever that may be worth, I ultimately gave up trying to use ANY environment variables for handling ANY component path entries into the registry.  I finally just went with RegAddBoot 0x1 for ALL of those Acronis component path entries, regardless of which WinPE project I was using.  It's not exactly an elegant solution, but it was the only way that I could get TI and DD to work consistently under all PE1, PE2 and PE3 builds for both x86 and x64 architectures.  Otherwise, even if you get one subversion release to work, the next Acronis "update" release may not. 

Welcome Dera,

yep I am familiar with your "never create" topic princaple  feel free 

I just got dd11 and backuprestore11 from a friend, well you know i do not use ac. things besides will do some trials and let you know 

First of all congratulations you guys on Gena!
It is a real nice project

Hi Dera,

Welcome! Hope you are well!

 

We hope you like Gena as much as we do. We spent a lot of time working from the ground up on this project so that everything is opensource and able to be improved by anybody.

Unfortunately nowadays i haven't got much time for my hobby.

Yes, that's the same for Lancelot and I as well.

We just keep things ticking along little bit by little bit, keeping things fun.

I'm sorry that I can't really help with your script as I don't have Acronis Backup & Recovery.

Regards,
Galapo.

Hi

Yes, i guess i will, just now i am only at the start of the road.

@Lancelot
be aware, in my opinion:
integrating abr10+dd11 to the same PE build is nearly impossible with the classic PE building methods
(thanks for the nowadays forced very sensitive mms service)
i mean using not the home version of d11
but the enterprise versions - like Advanced Workstation/Advanced Server,
so i will try abr11+dd11advanced together - maybe there is some improvement in their enterprise line
maybe abr11+dd11home can coexist in the same build - do not know

Regards,
dera

Welcome Dera




To, slim down that hugh thing a bit.
I would say following files are not needed:

Appears to be linux related:

agent_ramdisk.dat
kernel.dat
*.so
f11.cfg

Appears to be DOS related:

BootAgentActiveRestoreDos.run
bootmenu.bin
bootwiz.bin
hddhook.com
mouse.com

Appears to be PreWin / Bootexecute related:

auto_reactivate.bin
auto_reactivate64.bin
AutoPartNt.exe
autosid.bin
autosid64.bin

That error message about localgroup, Seems only 2 files missing.

Added to WoW64 script: WOW64_Basic.Script v10 (Gena only)

 

Hi JFX,

Thanks for the updated script. I've uploaded it to the server.

Regards,
Galapo.

Hi JFX,

THANKS a lot