User`s guide

8 Tools

This section describes Acronis Bootable Media Builder and Acronis Recovery Expert tools.

After reading this section, you will have learned how to create bootable media in order to use

Acronis Disk Director on bare metal or outside of an operating system, and how to recover deleted or

lost volumes.

In this section

Acronis Bootable Media Builder .............................................................. 63

Acronis Recovery Expert .......................................................................... 70

Acronis Disk Editor ................................................................................... 71

8.1 Acronis Bootable Media Builder

Acronis Disk Director has a bootable version that can run from bootable media without booting an

operating system.

Bootable media is physical media (CD, DVD, USB drive or other media supported by a machine BIOS

as a boot device) that boots on any PC-compatible machine and enables you to run Acronis Disk

Director either in a Linux-based environment or Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE),

without the help of an operating system. You can create bootable media using Acronis Bootable

Media Builder. Acronis Bootable Media Builder also provides the ability to create an ISO image of a

bootable disc on a hard disk.

There are situations in which you might prefer to run Acronis Disk Director from bootable media. For

example:

 to use Acronis Disk Director on a non-Windows systems, like Linux

 if you do not often use Acronis Disk Director and therefore do not want to install it on the

machine

 to access the data that has survived in a corrupted system

 to create basic or dynamic volumes on bare metal

 to perform offline operations on a boot volume that cannot be done online because of restricted

access, being permanently locked by the running applications or for any other reason.

If there is a PXE server in your local network, its administrator can also save the bootable Acronis

Disk Director on this server. Then any computer that supports network boot will be able to boot

Acronis Disk Director from this PXE server.

If you have other Acronis products, such as Acronis True Image Home, installed on your machine, you

can also include bootable versions of these programs on the same bootable media.

Linux-based bootable media

Linux-based media contains bootable version of Acronis Disk Director based on Linux kernel. It can

boot and perform operations on any PC-compatible hardware, including bare metal and machines

with corrupted or non-supported file systems.