Restored Image has changed from when taken

[vista_man]

Silly me (dumb me!), being inquisitive, I installed a trial copy of DriveClone Pro. On reboot to finalise the installation I found that my desktop resolution had changed, the screen background colour was now black (was blue), icons all over the place and that Vista Aero colour scheme was messed up with lots of boxes now a solid dark grey. Some fiddling sorted some issues out but not all. Had a brief look at DriveClone Pro but was not impressed.

As part of the install, DriveClone Pro put a ‘secure zone’ on the partition (same drive as the OS) which housed my Acronis Images.

Having already had enough of DriveClone Pro I reinstalled an Acronis Image taken immediately prior to the install of DriveClone Pro. I will eradicate this rubbish was my thought.

The restore went OK till Vista started up only to find that the issues described above still existed. As well DriveClone Pro ‘snapshot’ kicked in, advised there had been some change and proceeded to reinstall a snapshot. What the!

I was under the impression reinstalling the Acronis Image would sort all my issues out, as it has reliably done in the past.

As a work around I reinstalled DriveClone Pro and immediately uninstalled it hoping to get rid of anything to do with DriveClone Pro and the snapshot feature which might be hidden on the other partition.

Another restore of the Acronis Image (using a boot disk) did not result in DriveClone Pro snapshot kicking in (good) but the desktop and aero issues remained.

I can not understand why a reinstall of an Acronis Image does not 100% revert the OS back to what it was at the time of taking the backup. (interestingly, I have once before found some entries in the registry for some monitor software install that supposedly should have been eradicated by an Image restore).

I reformatted the drive where the Acronis Images and DriveClone Pro snapshot resided and another reinstall of an Acronis Image still comes up with a black desktop background.

Acronis Image validation is OK and it does restore OK but is wrong once restored. I was under the impression an Acronis restore did a soft format as part of the restore process.

I believe I have now eradicated DriveClone Pro (maybe not). An Acronis Image taken post fix up, backs up and restores OK

Anyone with some advice as to how this can happen. Any know fix. Only thing I can think of is there is still some trace of DriveClone Pro resident somewhere OR DriveClone Pro has somewhat corrupted the Acronis Image.

[shieber]

Is the Driveclone hidden partitin still there?

[vista_man]

Hi shieber

thanks for responding

I reformatted the partition where DriveClone put its snapshot files so what ever was there should now be gone.

For info:

Tonight, i reinstalled an Acronis Image off a DVD backup taken some time ago and the restore worked OK. This proves that Acronis is working OK

I then reinstalled once again an Acronis Image from the partition where DriveClone put its snapshot file. This restore again gave me the same problems-black screen, resolution out etc.

An Acronis Image backup taken tonight (after everything sorted) and stored in the same partition as the suss Acronis Images restores OK. Some good news.

This leads me to believe DriveClone has somehow corrupted the Acronis Images that were resident in the partition. This would also explain why the Acronis restore, to get rid of DriveClone, did what it did-it was corrupted.

Strange how the Image can be changed but still work OK to complete the restore process.

Needless to say i will be staying with Acronis TI

Can anyone confirm that Acronis, when doing an image restore, formats the partiton first as part of the restore process.

cheers

[jmk94903]

-{ Quote: "...Can anyone confirm that Acronis, when doing an image restore, formats the partiton first as part of the restore process.

cheers" }-Actually, it replaces the partition with a formatted partition. That's even more thorough than reformatting.

DriveClone Pro is certainly a nasty piece of work when TI is present.