Adding Acronis Startup Recovery Manager to GRUB

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi all,

First of all, the last time I used suse was back when 9.3 was released which I happily used for about a year or two. But now I am back again and running 11.2 and I have to congratulate the community for their hard work and effort for this release!

I wanted to share my experience. I have a dual boot running Win 7 and Suse 11.2. My advice is to install Win 7 first, then Suse. I’ve spent countless hours trying to set the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager and every time I tried, I either loose GRUB or Acronis and vice versa. So here is the best and the most non-intrusive way to do it >> Extract Acronis Startup Recovery Manager and add to GRUB list and it works perfectly! I found this article: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=449167

Here is a snip off the article:

Step 1: Extract the Acronis files from the bootable CD
As root (sudo -s) do the following:
Code:

mount /media/cdrom 
mkdir /boot/acronis
cp /media/cdrom/Recovery\ Manager/* /boot/acronis
umount /media/cdrom

This will copy all the files off the Acronis bootable CD to a new folder “/boot/acronis”

Step 2: Extract the initrd file:
Acronis compresses the initrd file to ramdisk.dat, so we’ll extract it:
Code:

gunzip -c ramdisk.dat > initrd
rm ramdisk.dat

You should now have a list of files as follows:
Code:

-rw-r--r-- 1 1.8M 2007-05-20 02:07 bootmenu.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1  22K 2007-05-20 02:07 bootwiz.sys
-rw-r--r-- 1  268 2007-05-20 02:07 f11.cfg
-rw-r--r-- 1  29M 2007-05-20 14:44 initrd
-rw-r--r-- 1 659K 2007-05-20 02:07 kernel.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 4.8K 2007-05-20 02:07 mouse.com
-rw-r--r-- 1  23K 2007-05-20 02:07 splash.run

I’m fairly certain you dont need all the files, but for simplicity we’ll copy them all.

Step 3: Edit the Grub menu.lst file:
The next step is to add an entry to the end of the /boot/grub/menu.lst file:

#Acronis Grub menu.lst entry
title    Acronis Home v10.0
root    (hd0,0)
kernel    (hd0,0)/boot/acronis/kernel.dat quiet vga=788 ramdisk_size=40000
initrd    (hd0,0)/boot/acronis/initrd

Note: you will need to change the (hd0,0) to reflect the hard disk and partition that you are booting acronis from.

Step 4: Restart and check your Grub menu

Note: For those who are not comfortable with editing GRUB, you can add using Yast Administrator.

YaST Administrator>System>Bootloader.
http://www.armifinance.com.au/images/1.gif
http://www.armifinance.com.au/images/2.gif

Then Save it.

Hope this helps others too.

Ariel.

2

Thanks for posting this. Just out of interest: why? On the - hopefully rare - occasions when you need it, why not simply boot from the CD?

3

I travel a lot with my laptop. I simply dont like carrying cd’s around with me. ATI is mainly used for restoring my Windows partition. I develop and test a lot and mostly, I hammer my windows image so much with different softwares, configuration etc that my machine configuration stuffs up, slow performance, virus…etc. As soon as I hit my threshold where I think I need a fresh clean install, I just restore to my preferred clean and optimized image in approx 5min. Can’t be stuffed looking for CDs etc. I even do this while commuting in train. Just boot to ATI and off I go. Really just for convenience sake.

I sometimes use Virtual Images using VMWare on most occasion but it is not enough for what I want/need to do. I guess everyones preference and line of work are different. But this the most efficient and convenient system for me.

Right now, I am booting to SuSE, second to list Win 7, Acronis then Failsafe. I am back to SuSE again. Just love it.

Also, to point out, I completely changed my kids desktop to openSuse. No more viruses or stuffing up the image. They got used to it pretty quickly. I managed to setup openSUSE as close to Windows functionaility, look and feel (Primarily because my kids dont miss out functionality wise with School stuff coz they use Windows). So the navigation, look and feel is pretty close to windows. I use Mozilla Firefox Vista-Aero theme!, and it was easy for them to port to SuSE (My two kids are 7 and 3yrs).

4

Mine are 18 (uses mostly linux, windu dual boot for gaming), 12 (hates windu systems, they never do what he wants…) and 7 (linux gcompris user since 2004); I never changed any desktop to “emulate” a windows environment. Let them know there’s more than winduism. All this more than a bit off-topic, I know.

5

Thanks for the explanation. Never thought of laptop use on the fly…

6

I hear you. I just dont want them coming to school and end up looking clueless using schools machines. But I guess as they get older, Im sure he will be ahead of others :wink:

re: linux gcompris

You the man. I was looking for something like this for my 3yr old.