A hairy experience trying to create a Secure Zone

This started yesterday afternoon, when I decided to try creating a Secure Zone. Up to then all my experience had been with creating and using
DVD images. With a 50GBy C:, of which I have never used as much as
13GBy at a time, taking 20GBy out of C: for a Secure Zone seemed the
obvious approach. The Wizard guided me through the process, up to the
point at which a reboot was required. Somewhere during the process of
updating the partition information, an evanescent message to the effect
that a write outside a partition had occurred went by, but in due course
Win98SE did start up.

True Image then couldn't access the Secure Zone. If I tried to create
an image in it, I was offered the choice of my small untouched D: and
my properly reduced C:, but not the 20GBy supposedly put aside for the
Secure Zone. Recalling the bad-write error message, I rebooted in Safe
Mode and scanned C:. Errors were found, in fact it took three runs to
get an error-free scan. For good measure, I defragmented and scanned
one more time. Booting normally, I next did a (Norton, 2003) virus scan.
This informed me that my master boot and boot records had changed;
did I want them fixed. I assented; maybe not the best idea? Then I did another restart.

No system disk found. This is about as bad as it gets, worse even than
the Blue Screen of Death. Just before the attempt to create Secure Zone,
I'd done a DVD image creation, so I rebuilt C:. Twice during the recovery,
I got an error message "Error opening the file", with a choice to abort or
to retry and "continue with volume [number]". I retried and the recovery
finished with the announcement that it had been successful.

Question: if the recovery says it has been successful, is it telling the
unalloyed truth? Did each retry start again where the recovery had
left off, or might something have been skipped? My number of files
looked more or less okay, but it would take a lot of testing to see if
every last application works and can access every last file it used.

Second question: if I create an image of a partition of a given size,
then (successfully) create a Secure Zone using part of that partition,
can the image, which thinks the partition is as big as it used to be,
be successfully restored to the now-shrunken partition?

Third question: what likely happened when I tried to create a Secure
Zone? Are there known pitfalls in this process to avoid?

Thanks.

 

Hello Upbacker,

Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

We are really sorry for the inconveniences.

If finally you get the message that the recovery was successfull it means that all the data was restored successfully. The error message you encountered might have resulted from some problems with media and some parts were read only from the second attempt.

The image can be restored to any partition if the size of the uncompressed data is less than the size of the partition. In this case you will be asked of the way you want to manage the partition layout (if you restore several partitions). If you restore single partition the free space will be decreased.

As for the third question, it would be better if you send Acronis Report (please see https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=55317 for the instructions) to support@acronis.com along with the description and the question. Possible reason may be some problems with hard drive or some software that works with hard disk.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman