Acronis Media Builder

Acronis Media Builder allows you to make a USB flash drive, external drive, or a blank CD/DVD bootable. In case Windows cannot start, use the bootable media to run a standalone version of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office and recover your computer.

You can create several types of bootable media:

  • Acronis bootable media

    This type is recommended for most users.

  • WinPE-based media with the Acronis plug-in

    Running Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office in the preinstallation environment may provide better compatibility with your computer’s hardware because the preinstallation environment uses Windows drivers.

    We recommend that you create this type of media, when Acronis bootable media did not help you boot your computer.

    To use this option, you need one of the following components to be installed:

    • Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK).

      This component is required for creating WinPE 3.0.

    • Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK).

      This component is required for creating WinPE 4.0, WinPE 5.0, and WinPE 10.0.

  • WinRE-based media with the Acronis plug-in

    This type of bootable media is similar to WinPE-based media, but it has an important advantage—you do not need to download WADK or WAIK from the Microsoft website. Windows Recovery Environment is already included in Windows Vista and later versions of Windows. Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office uses these files from your system to create WinRE-based media. Similar to WinPE-based media, you can add your drivers for better compatibility with your hardware. However, WinRE-based media can be used only on the computer where it was created or on a computer with the same operating system.

Notes

  • We recommend that you create a new bootable media after each Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office update.
  • If you use non-optical media, the media must have a FAT16 or FAT32 file system.
  • Acronis Media Builder supports only x64 WinPE 3.0, WinPE 4.0, WinPE 5.0, and WinPE 10.0.

  • Your computer must have:

    • For WinPE 3.0—at least 256 MB RAM
    • For WinPE 4.0—at least 512 MB RAM
    • For WinPE 5.0—at least 1 GB RAM
    • For WinPE 10.0—at least 512 MB RAM
  • If Acronis Media Builder does not recognize your USB flash drive, you can try using the procedure described in the Acronis Knowledge Base article at https://kb.acronis.com/content/1526.
  • When booting from the bootable media, you cannot perform backups to disks or partitions with Ext2/Ext3/Ext4, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP file systems.
  • When booting from the bootable media and using a standalone version of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, you cannot recover files and folders encrypted with the encryption available in Windows XP and later operating systems. For more information, see File-level security settings for backup. However, backups encrypted using the Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office encryption feature can be recovered.
  • If you decide to create a bootable media on a drive that already has a Survival Kit, Acronis Media Builder will attempt to overwrite and update only the hidden partition with the bootable media without formatting the whole drive.