Acronis True Image Backup Archive Explorer, Hibernation and MBR?

Hibernation worked perfectly well on my system until a few weeks ago, when I bought a bigger hard disk and cloned all the partitions.
Then I installed and updated a few programs, and did some more things to reorganize, optimize and speed up Win2k SP4.

Now apparently hibernation still works and shuts the computer down. On the windows drive, after every attempt there is a recent hiberfil.sys of the same size as the memory, and on C:, there is hiberfil.sys with linkmulti to the correct partition, also recent.
But the computer never wakes up and resumes, it always boots as if there were no hibernation.

Searching for the problem I discovered the "Acronis True Image Backup Archive Explorer" in the device manager, starting timntr.sys 1.1 build 15. I do not know, how long this has already been there.

Deactivating it, I got the BSOD - inaccessible_boot_device - and could only reboot with the last working configuration. As TrueImage works fine, I do not intent to deinstall it, only temporarily deactivate it for testing hibernation.
But the BSOD made me suspicious that there is more to that timntr.sys than a simple driver to access files on a stored image.

I started to wonder, if by any chance Hibernation needs something in the MBR, which TrueImage has modified.

I did a lot of googling and searching this forum, but I cannot find any answer. Anybody an idea? Thanks.

 

When you installed TI did you activate the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager. It allows you to press F11? and go into recovery mode. That modifies the MBR but AFAIK, it is the only thing that does.

 

This is a very old version of Trueimage.exe - 1.0.0.58 - that came from the german computer magazine CHIP many years ago. Acronis Startup Recovery Manager is unknown to me.

So if TI does not change the MBR, then I have two independent questions to figure out:
1. Why is there no resume from hibernation? But here might not be the forum for this.
2. Why does deactivating 'timntr.sys' cause a BSOD with inaccessible_boot_device? But as I can keep it, this is now more a question of curiosity. There was another thread about this, but if there was an answer in it, I did not understand it. Would I remove the entire registry entry for 'timounter', then maybe the system would be completely messed up.

 

Try disabling hibernation on your PC. Reboot. Then re-enable hibernation. See if that fixes the problem.

 

I have done this - both hiberfil.sys were gone and after rebooting and reactivating hibernation were newly written.

 

Hello maruli,

Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image Home!

Please follow the instructions from our Public Knowledge Base article to correctly remove Acronis True Image Backup Archive Explorer:
1622: Removing Acronis True Image Backup Archive Explorer
It should resolve the problem.

If you deactivate 'timntr.sys' and don't delete the entry "timounter" from "UpperFilters" registry string you get BSOD on boot. The reason - it is a low-level disk driver that is loaded during system bootup. The systems fails to load it and stops the loading process to prevent possible data corruption.

Acronis true image doesn't modify MBR if you don't activate Startup Recovery Manager. Even if you activate it you can get back to the old MBR by deactivating it.

Thank you.
Daniel Pustovoy

 

Thanks for the clarification, that allows me to keep the Backup Archive Explorer active, since it does not interfere with the MBR.
I start to suspect that the hibernation problem is caused by the size of 160GB of my new drive, and I have to search elsewhere for any possible solution.