Disk Directory 10 - USB device not accepting new address -110

[AppliedIntegration]

I am doing some testing with an older machine. It appears to have a 1.0 USB port, because when I plug a WD 500GB external USB drive in while running XP, I get that "This device will run faster in a 2.0 port" message.

When booting to Disk Director 10, I see two errors saying the "USB device is not accepting a new address -110". Directory finishes booting, but the USB drive isn't shown as a disk.

Does Directory support USB drives on 1.0 ports in the first place?

I can use the same drive on a different machine (which I believe is 2.0 port) and the drive is fine, so I know it's not external drive.

Thanks,
Don

[AppliedIntegration]

Perhaps I should add a bit more to this to see if I can get any input. I've got two test PC's here that I'm working back and forth between. The first is a Dell OptiPlex GX270. The external drive is a Western Digital 500GB Mybook. I can boot Disk Director Suite to that combination, copy partitions back and forth just fine.

The second PC model is a Dell OptiPlex GX240. I have tried this combination on two of these GX240's and they both behave the same. I boot the machine up, and Acronis sits there longer than usual (sometimes the error message displays, sometimes it doesn't) and finally, when it goes all the way up, the USB drive is not available.

What I'm testing is basically a method of creating some disaster recovery snapshots of some older legacy servers, and I'm sure many, if not most of them will be machines that do not have USB 2.0 ports on them. I will be getting my hands on some of these older machines next week, but I'd like to know if this idea is doomed before it begins. I'm basically just trying to figure out if this combination of DDS and the USB drive will work for many older machines or not. I'll be dealing with a lot of old IBM machines as I attempt this, in fact the biggest majority will be IBM's, so I'm not dealing with no-name white boxes here, but I just can't decide if DDS is going to be very "backward compatible" with these older machines.

Any input would be appreciated before I start this project.

[K0LO]

Don:

Are you running Disk Director (DD) in Windows are are you booting from the Disk Director recovery CD? If the former, DD should support whatever devices Windows can see and work with.

If the latter, the results are highly dependent on the machine, its USB BIOS support, and the state of Linux driver support in Disk Director. You may need to do one of the following three things on different PCs:

1. Start by booting the "Full" mode (Linux) version of DD, which has USB support. However, DD is almost 2 yrs old now and may not have Linux drivers for more modern hardware. If this does not work then try #2.

2. Go to the Acronis web site and log into your account. Browse to your supported products and download the alternate ISO for Disk Director 10. This ISO is different than the one that you create with Bootable Media Builder. It uses Isolinux as a boot loader and has more updated driver support. If this doesn't work, try #3.

3. Boot DD in the "Safe" mode (DOS), which may not support USB hardware unless the PC BIOS enumerates external USB disks when it starts up. Some PC hardware does this, so if yours does then you will see the USB disks in DD safe mode.

For working on a lot of disparate hardware the very best solution is to use a Windows-based recovery environment like BartPE, VistaPE, or a variant of WinPE. The hardware support in the latest WinPE environments is the best available. However, this solution takes a bit more work building the recovery environment, but is worth it.

[AppliedIntegration]

Mark,

Thanks for the message. I am booting from the DD CD, and going into the "Full" version when testing this, then going into Manual mode. I tried "Safe" mode and got the same result, the external drive doesn't show up. If I boot this machine into Windows normally, it has no trouble recognizing the ext. drive.

I will go try getting the iso you mentioned, and I'll poke around some of those other application that you mentioned. These older machines are not Windows machines, they are running various versions of Unix/Linux. Some SCO OS5, some SCO Unixware and some Redhat. I am basically just looking for a disk image application that will let me make a full image of the disk for off-site disaster recovery storage. I need to do a disk image to retain some software licenses that I can't recreate if I have to rebuild the OS on a new machine.

Thanks,
Don

[K0LO]

Don:

Disk Director isn't intended as a disk imaging application, although it does have the ability to copy a partition. You may have better luck with the companion Acronis product, Acronis True Image Home (TI), which is intended to be a disk imaging and cloning application.

TI will enable you to save an image of a partition, or partitions, or the entire disk as a compressed archive file.