Acronis Secure Zone problem?

[supertrader3333]

Hello people,
I have Installed acronis true image on a windows xp sp2 system, which has 4 partitions, c,d,e, and f.

The system logs onto a windows 2000 server

I have created an image on the c drive, which is the system drive, and stored it on the f drive.

Now, after I have made the image, I have created and activated the Acronis secure zone with 100 mb disk space, and it resized the partition to make it.

Now, yesterday, there was a problem with the system, and I wanted to restore the image created earlier.

F11 does not load, it just freezes at Loading acronis.....

then I tried to boot with the cd, and am able to boot to the graphical interface with the safe version.

I can restore the image created earlier, but I cannot boot properly with this restored image.

Sometimes it reaches the login screen with CTRL ALT DEL and sometmes it hangs on the windows logo screen itself.

A few times it even came to the position where I was able to put in my user ID and password for my domain, but it said, cannot log on. It was able to log into the local machine, but used to reboot after sometime.

My question is....Have I made a mistake of creating an acronis secure zone AFTER I made the image, and now the restored image is having problems? maybe an mbr issue? I am not an expert with mbr...

Also, if it is a problem with the secure zone, should it give me login problems?

Please help people, It was on my advice that my company has installed Acronis, and I will have to loose face in front of them, as I had hyped up Acronis a lot to them, because I was using it successfully at home for about a year and it had saved me about 3 times!

Sorry for the long post.

Please help me.

[bVolk]

Hello supertrader3333,

When you created the image of C:, the Windows installation was aware of 4 partitions. Creating the Secure Zone, you added one more (though hidden) partition and when you activated the Startup Recovery Manager (I gather that from your mentioning F11) you also had the MBR modified.

Now you are restoring the image of C: (with the Windows installation expecting 4 partitions) to a disk with 5 partitions. Hence the trouble.

I would suggest you boot from Rescue CD and remove the Secure Zone with the Manage Secure Zone tool. That should also restore the MBR to the original. After that you should restore the image of C: to it's original 4-partition layout, perhaps including the imaged MBR (if your TI build is 3567 or higher) in the restoration (though that should not be really necessary).

For the future you would better buy an external HD to store the images. You won't need SZ then. Anyway, I would suggest you do not reactivate Startup Recovery Manager. It's not a must to have. It's just a small covenience which does not compensate for having the MBR modified.

[supertrader3333]

Thanks for the reply, friend.

Now, one more problem with removing the Acronis secure zone, is that it asks me which drive I want the space which will be free to be allocated to.

I do not remember which drive I had originally taken the space from :(

Suppose I select the wrong drive to restore the Acronis secure zone, will it still be a problem?

PS: Surfing through other posts, I have discovered the cure for the domain logon problem. Now I just need to get the system working again, because it has again gone back to the cycle of hanging at the windows screen

Thanks for the reply.

Please please someone try to answer my query about freeing up acronis secure zone.

Thanks.

[bVolk]

Hi again supertrader3333,

You may assign the space previously occupied by the Secure Zone to another partition than that it came from, but most probably it should be a contiguous one.

[supertrader3333]

Ok friends, ann update!

I removed the Acronis Secure zone, and allocated the free space to c drive.
It stopped the F11 message from coming again.

Then I booted with the bootable acronis disk....
One of the disks said cannot load boot loader and hung,
But I had 2 cd'd and with the other cd I was able to start Acronis recovery manager, in its safe mode, full mode hangs.

I restored the image created 3 months back, and reebooted, but the same problem , the machine used to come to logon screen, and after entering the user id and password, it used to waitt for 30 seconds saying applying settings, and BAM! reboot again.

So, I started up the computer in windows safe mode, and went to msconfig, and selected diagnostic startup, with minimum resources.

Now, the system boots perfect, can also log on to domain, but I cannot run many programs, as many windows services are not started. Like trying to make another image, I get an error, RPC service not running.

What are the essential services that I can enable on the machine to get back all mapping and connectivity?

PS: I can also browse the internet by connecting to my domain.