Can't update or create Acronis Survival Kit on external USB drive after upgrade to new build 39703

Dominic, just looking at the size of the ACPHO media when I use the option to create a WIM file using the 'Simple' method, this is 902MB so should still fit fine inside the 2GB partition created by the Survival Kit, especially as the other associated files are very small.

Note: rather than using the upgrade option, you can just create an updated WIM file then use this to replace the .WIM file in the 2GB partition for the Survival Kit drive.  You will need to allocate a Windows drive letter to the partition and delete the older .wim file along with giving the new file the same name, normally boot.wim.  I prefer to use this method when I have a working drive.  You could always resize the 2GB partition using a partition manager tool - it can be up to 32GB in size if needed!  That would allow keeping several different WIM files that can be swapped in / out as occasion requires.

Thank you, Steve.  I don't have any experience with the .WIM files (I can figure out if I have to) and honestly just want software to work.  I'm a 32+year IT professional that gets tired of having to debug other people's stuff to figure out a workaround.  I'll step away from this for a bit and come back when I have the patience. Oh, and shame on me for upgrading to a new version so soon after it is released. LOL

I got a few new PC's a year ago and went through the pains of setting up and testing a nice backup / recovery environment with new external hard drives, both for Windows and Mac laptops using the ASKs so I wouldn't have to keep track of bootable recovery media.  In reading some threads on with prior versions of ATI, I see that ASKs have been a big issue at times; interestingly, I've never had any issues and thought they've been pretty solid until now.

I opened a case with Support on this and if I see the word "kindly" one more time in the email, I think I'm going to puke.  The first thing they want me to do is to reformat my entire drive... yeah, not losing all my backup history.   I can experiment with a spare drive but I have never had success with getting any issue resolved via support cases unfortunately.  So, I'll be closing that case.

Also, I've read the long post about finding alternatives to the now ACPHO, and one comment by you about how ATI 2019 still seems to work though unsupported; thankfully, I have a license for that.  I have ATI backups of old computers back to 2011 and fortunately still run parallel TIB format backups along with TIBX on my primary computer.  Regretfully, some of the newer features of the product are decent but I suppose I'll start figuring out how to disinvest myself like so many others. I have long since thought that Acronis does not ensure that their core product features are solid before introducing new, trendy things. I won't even comment about the whole "protection" fiasco.

Thanks for all of the valuable info you put out on these forums, and for listening to me rant a little.

Best regards, Dom

Update: I expanded the ASK partition on a spare external disk drive from 2GB to 4GB and the creation process succeeded.  Interestingly, the .WIM file that was created was ~2.1GB in size.  I did boot from the ASK partition successfully.  Who knows if it's something specific to this system or not but I'll probably just revert to using alternate bootable recovery media.  Thanks again.

Dom, I would suspect that the difference in size of the .WIM file is coming from the Windows Recovery environment for some reason?

Steve, after lots of testing, you are correct. This was not an Acronis issue with the new build but, rather, a situation coming from my specific Recovery Environment on this computer.

I was able to find an older USB flash drive with recovery media and compared the .WIM file of that one to the newly created larger one using 7-Zip. My system (laptop) has two ultra high definition graphics adapter drivers, one from Intel and one from NVIDIA. I found that the driver files for each in the file repository of the driver store on my system are huge, >1GB uncompressed and call it ~500MB compressed in the .WIM file.

I happened to have rolled back a bad driver for the Intel graphics adapter not too long ago and that unused version of the driver remained in the active driver store.  Once I found the correct Windows command to delete it, the new .WIM file dropped to 1.6GB and was able to just fit with the rest of the recovery files into 2GB ASK partition. For your reference, the command is pnputil /delete-driver <example.inf> /uninstall.  Unique driver versions are assigned .inf files with names like OEMnnn.inf so you have to use the pnputil /enum-drivers command and sift the output to find the specific driver you want to delete.

Here are the drivers in question for your reference.  I suppose with the popularity of UHD displays and their respective large driver footprints, this could be more of a problem for others in the future if they try to use the Acronis Survival Kit vs. some external recovery media.

igcc_dch.inf for the Intel UHD Graphics adapter
nvhmsi.inf for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 22060 adapter

Best regards,
Dom