Acronis TI Home Edition Hangs Up the Machine When USB Drive Is Absent

I have installed the Secure Zone on an external USB hard disk. When that disk is not plugged in, Acronis TI
Home Edition gives me a black screen and does not allow Windows XP to load. The same thing happens when
the hard disk gets plugged in along with other USB drives. Acronis then gets obviously confused with the change in the drive letters. What is happening?
Thanks!

tatabu

 

It is not a question of Acronis being confused. It is expected behaviour if you create a secure zone on an external drive and activate the start up recovery manager. The MBR is changed to reflect your configuration and will therefore not boot if the USB drive is not present.

Because your system now depends on having two fit and healthy drives up and running to operate, one of which includes your backups, you have actually increased the risk of failure.

Do you really need the start up recovery manager? It is quite easy to do the operation from the recovery CD. There is really nothing to be gained by having a secure zone on an external drive.

I would suggest you remove the secure zone and recovery manager using the TI Wizards. This will restore the MBR to its previous state.
If you really want the recovery manager you could still have this function if you make a tiny secure zone on your main drive. You could then store your images on the USB drive with no problem. You could even partition this drive to tuck away your images.

Xpilot

 

Xpilot,

Thank you very much for your reply. I did remove the secure zone, and now I get the "MBR Error 3" message before Windows XP loads. If I unplug the drive that used to have the secure zone, the computer hangs up again. I get only a black screen with a flashing cursor. I read that in order to get rid of the "MBR Error 3" I would have to reactivate OSS. I cannot find the OSS selector on the Acronis bootable CD. Where is it?
Thanks again.

tatabu

 

Are you in fact using a third party boot manager?
Normally when a secure zone is removed,using the manage secure zone wizard, the start up recovery manager would also be automatically removed and the MBR would be put back to its original state.

However if there is another boot manager present it should have been updated when the recovery manager was first installed. I have not been there but I presume a similar process should be followed when the recovery manager was removed as part of the secure zone removal.

There should be no need to re-install the OS ot OSS. There are several ways of repairing the MBR using Windows commands such as fixboot etc.

I hope someone else will guide you through this process as I will have to leave for a while as other duties call

Xpilot

 

tatabu,

You will find the OSS, which I guess means Operating System Selector, on that CD not the True Image CD.

If you are using Acronis Disk Director it does have its own forum where items like MBR 3 errors are solved.

You might find this post useful
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=132842&highlight=mbr+error

Xpilot