Backup / Restore for Bay Trail - ASUS Tablet (eMMC drive)

[MarkA]

Hi -

I am a long time user of all of TB's products. I'm writing this to document my recent experience with moving to a new Intel Bay Trail powered Windows 8.1 Tablet / Convertible - the Asus T100. This is a 10" tablet with a detachable keyboard that features the latest (Nov 2013) Intel "Bay Trail' Atom 3740 CPU, 2GB ram, and a 60GB Flash drive in a lightweight, affordable package.

I found the posting about turning fast boot mode off for Win 8, and did this. This is a Flash drive, so there doesn't appear to be any difference.

Of course I installed the latest (2.83) IFW package. That's where things got interesting. I could not get VSS or Phylock to lock, except under weird conditions (immediately after booting, and not selecting one of the partitions would work...).

So I tried booting an IFL USB boot drive after using the advanced booting options to disable UEFI secure boot - this booted when I used an IFL USB boot created on the Asus T100 (32 bit Win 8.1) but would hang when using the IFL USB I created on an earlier machine that ran Win7 x64. IFD simply didn't work because this is a UEFI bios (no classic mode). Note that I said IFL did boot - But it did not 'see' the 64GB internal Flash drive. At this point I ran across the tutorial for TBWinRE.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/howto/ ... torial.htm

Using this, I was able to "Modify the Win Recovery Environment" that essentially embeds IFW (and utils) into the windows advanced recovery tools and make a full backup of the 64GB Flash Drive.

But, I was not able to successfully use the WinRE Builder script to (2) create a TBWinRE USB Flash Drive. It would issue a warning that one or more files were missing (I found that etsfboot.com is not on this machine). How could I have a bullet proof backup without a boot disk?

I used windows own program to create a recovery disk. This is essentially copying the Recovery Environment, that now has IFW embedded into it, to an 8GB USB Flash drive. As a bonus, the utility has an option for removing the 8GB Recovery partition on the 64Gb Flash drive leaving more user accessible drive space. I verified that this USB RE drive boots, and the IFW utilities are available.

This leaves me with a method to use IFW as my bullet proof backup tools. And two questions: 1) Why wasn't IFL that I created on the Asus T100 able to see the 64GB Flash Drive, and 2) Why wasn't TBWinRE Builder able to create a bootable USB disk?

I'm guessing that this is because the 64GB Flash drive is not a typical drive. The Intel Bay Trail chip supports using a type of flash module called an eMMC as a disk drive. This isn't SATA, PATA nor USB and it needs drivers that are not the traditional ones needed. The attraction of the new Intel chip set is that it sets a new Price (low) / Performance point that is really good (The Asus machine starts at $349 for a windows tablet that includes the keyboard, Office home & student, etc), and using eMMC is cheaper than a SATA interface. I expect that more of these will see adoption using eMMC. I for one don't trust that machine is safely backed up until I have a TB image file at an offsite location, and I'm glad that the TBWinRE tools provide a way to do this.

Cheers - Mark A.

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

If only etfsboot.com was missing you should still have been able to create the UFD boot media (Windows 8.1 doesn't include the disc booting files). With that file missing MakeDisk won't be able to create a TBWinRE ISO or bootable disc.

Did you continue on to MakeDisk after the warning and not see the UFD as a choice?

[Brian K]

Mark,

Nice post. This thread has some similarities...

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ucf/vi ... ?f=8&t=949

I've used TBWinRE to restore an OS image and to delete (using TBOSDT for BIBM) the 8 GB Recovery partition and create a new partition.

PHYLock won't lock the OS drive but VSS works fine.

[MarkA]

Paul -

After the message "Creating CD/UFD/ISO file layout..."

A warning appears "A duplicate file name exists, or the file cannot be found"

Then the warning appears with "One or more files are missing.....", Press any key to continue.

Pressing a key leads to a prompt to launch MAKEDISK, which when launched fails with a pop-up box that states "Unable to open etfsboot.com"

There is a section of the .cmd file that is testing for the existence of BCD, boot.sdi, etfsboot.com, and bootmgr - and etsfboot.com is the only one of these that is missing. A search from c:\ does not find this file on the tablet.

Brian - I read that thread. FWIW, I had switched to using VSS only, yet it would only get a lock on most of the partitions immediately after booting. strange.

- Mark

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

Mark,

Try using TBWinRE v1.6 (included with IFW 2.84) and see if that will build the UFD.

For the VSS issue you could try using either or both of the new VSS options (Lock Unsupported Volumes & Ignore Unsupported Volumes) and see if it helps.

[TeraByte Support(TP)]

MarkA wrote:
> This leaves me with a method to use IFW as my bullet proof backup tools.
> And two questions: 1) Why wasn't IFL that I created on the Asus T100 able
> to see the 64GB Flash Drive, and 2) Why wasn't TBWinRE Builder able to
> create a bootable USB disk?
>

For the IFL issue, please boot IFL on that system, and then create a report to email to me at:
tomp@terabyteunlimited.com

You can create the report by selecting "Create Report" from either the right-click desktop menu (GUI), or from the Auxiliary menu (CUI). This KB article also outlines how to do it: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=585

The report created is a text file (report.txt) that should help us figure out why the drive isn't being detected.
Thanks

[MarkA]

Following up here:

>>Try using TBWinRE v1.6 (included with IFW 2.84) and see if that will build the UFD.

The newly released TBWinRE in IFW 2.84 successfully builds a USB boot drive, that I confirmed boots OK.

>>For the VSS issue you could try using either or both of the new VSS options (Lock Unsupported Volumes & Ignore Unsupported Volumes) and see if it helps

IFW 2.84 works. VSS with Ignore unsupported volumes works (Lock Unsupported did not work, neither did VSS without either option checked). What's more, Phylock also worked. In all cases I started the backup, saw that it was running, then aborted to save time in testing the options.

A report file, on the IFL not 'seeing' the eMMC flash drive, has been mailed to Tom.

- Mark

[T-Rhex]

Sorry to revive an old thread but I'm having the same issue with IFL 2.94 and the Asus T100TA (eMMC drive). [and the thread's over a year old!]

I can get IFL to boot (after disabling secure boot) but it reports "No usable HD found!" when I try to start a backup. I went through the TB kb and found "Unable to view or access drives with IFL, TBOSDT, or Partition Work as normal user in Linux" (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=567) but either it doesn't apply or didn't make sense. (I'm a WIndows guy, I only use IFL because so far it's been the fastest and most reliable).

Was this issue resolved? Do I have to go the TBWinRE route?

Asus T100TA (Intel Atom Z3775)
Win 8.1 32-bit
IFL CUI nonet 2.94

Thanks,
tr

[TeraByte Support(TP)]

We thought it had been resolved with a kernel update at that time, but apparently not.

Please create an IFL report and email it to TeraByte Support (support@terabyteunlimited.com) so we can see the data. To do that on IFL (CUI), run 'createreport' from the Linux prompt, and then follow the prompt to save the file report.txt to a drive/partition (such as a USB flash drive). Then email the file report.txt to Support. If needed, this KB artivel explains how to create an IFL report:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=585


T-Rhex wrote:
> Sorry to revive an old thread but I'm having the same issue with IFL 2.94
> and the Asus T100TA (eMMC drive). [and the thread's over a year old!]
>
> I can get IFL to boot (after disabling secure boot) but it reports "No
> usable HD found!" when I try to start a backup. I went through the TB
> kb and found "Unable to view or access drives with IFL, TBOSDT, or
> Partition Work as normal user in Linux"
> (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=567) but either it
> doesn't apply or didn't make sense. (I'm a WIndows guy, I only use IFL
> because so far it's been the fastest and most reliable).
>
> Was this issue resolved? Do I have to go the TBWinRE route?
>
> Asus T100TA (Intel Atom Z3775)
> Win 8.1 32-bit
> IFL CUI nonet 2.94
>
> Thanks,
> tr

[T-Rhex]

Thanks very much for the timely response. Report emailed as requested.

I took a stab at making the TBWinRE boot disc and it was much easier than the length of the instructions had implied -- good job on simplifying the process with the .cmd file. I was able to boot with the TBWinRE disc and it did see the internal drive properly, allowing me to make a full image of the drive. Awesome software as always!

tr