Acronis Disk Director 12 - User Guide - Manual (Page 52)

52 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2014
7 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 .............................................................. 52
Acronis Recovery Expert .......................................................................... 59
Acronis Disk Editor ................................................................................... 60
7.1 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 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.
PE-based bootable media
PE-based bootable media contains a minimal Windows system called Windows Preinstallation
Environment (WinPE) and Acronis Plug-in for WinPE, that is, a modification of Acronis Disk Director
that can run in the preinstallation environment.