Activating/Deactivating ShadowProtect Desktop 3.5.1

Hey all,

Does ShadowProtect Desktop 3.5.1 allow you to activate and deactivate it to move to a different PC as many times as you want? If not, how many times are you limited to before you cannot do this anymore? The reason I ask is because I want to try the HIR feature of it, but this requires me to install on Windows and activate it. After I restore the image to another system, I will deactivate SP. I hope somebody knows. Thanks.

 

In their FAQ's, there something on How do I move my ShadowProtect license and software to a different computer

If you run into issues, I would try emailing support. In my experience they were helpful when I lost my activation rights after some time.

 

Thanks wat0114. I've actually been through their FAQ and I already saw that. I was hoping somebody on Wilders with experience using this software could comment on SP's deactivation limits.

Anyway I did some more searching on the subject, and I found this thread on the StorageCraft forums. In order to use HIR you must use the Boot Recovery Environment to image the system, but first you must boot to the OS and install ShadowProtect onto the system that will be imaged. In the thread mentioned above a user revealed that it is not necessary to activate the ShadowProtect installation that will be on the system. So all you need to do to be able to use HIR when you will be restoring, is to install the trial version of SP onto the OS being imaged, then boot to the SP Recovery Environment, and create the backup.

Now this has me wondering..... It seems to me that your only real need for the activation key is so that you can obtain the Recovery Environment ISO. Then you could do anything you need with this software from the RE, without ever having to activate it in Windows. Why would any user want to activate their ShadowProtect installation and use it from Windows?

 

Yes, I'd say you are 100% correct. The RE is all I use anyway, since I backup no more than once/week, sometimes not even that frequently. I find the RE is excellent.

 

Because of incremental backups for instance.

 

Oh I see, so ShadowProtect cannot do incremental backups from RE. Are there any other features of SP that only could be used in Windows, not RE?

Here's another question for SP users. I have a 160gb hard drive with Windows 7 freshly installed on it. Lets say I used 3rd party partitioning software to create a secondary partition on this HDD that is 100gb. Then lets say I used an external HDD to create a backup image of my other PC's primary 80gb HDD, which has Windows XP installed on it. Could I restore this image with ShadowProtect's HIR to the 100gb partition that I created on the Windows 7 HDD, and be able to boot to this partition? I am only asking this out of curiosity. I won't actually be attempting this.

Edit: arrrrgh... one more problem. This is somewhat related to my question above but this is something I am actually doing. I already created an image of that 80gb HDD. The problem is that it was actually a 232.88gb HDD but only 80gb of it was used up. When I made the image I told SP to not image the unused space. So now when I look at the image in RE it says volume size is 232gb but used space is 80gb. How can I restore this to an empty 160gb HDD and boot to it, if at all possible using SP?

 

The RE will do incrementals/Differentials, but not automatically like the installed software. youi have to manually boot off the RE then use the backup wizard to do so.

Good question! I would think so using the RE's HIR feature, but never tried it myself. After imaging the XP image to your 100 GB part, you could then set that part to "active", or even use EasyBCD to add the XP O/S to the Win 7 boot menu and it would probably work, provided the HIR feature did the job properly

I don't know if you can. I never did backup before omitting the free space so not really sure., but somehow I think it won't restore. Storage craft is supposedly making a future release that will enable restoring to small er images possible. This would be excellent.

 

So I can't restore the image to the 160gb HDD because SP wants to restore the whole 232gb along with all the unused space... its too big. I have a plan B though, but would like some input before I try this.

I am thinking of shrinking the size of the partition of the 232gb drive to 120gb and then trying to backup/restore again to the 160gb drive. As I said before, this drive is running on Windows XP and only 80gb of it is used up. How do I go about doing this? Also, is it safe for me to change the size of this partition? Is there any risk such as not being able to boot after, or loss of data?

 

Great idea; just backup critical data before the shrinking process. The most excellent Partition Wizard boot CD should do the job nicely. I have done numerous re-sizes with it - shrinking, expanding, and moving. Never failed me yet

 

I'm glad you mentioned partition wizard. It is a great tool, even better than the big name payware applications out there. It just simply works. I've got the portable version with me at all times on my flash.

 

It is the best pc tool-related discovery, thanks to mention of it somewhere in these forums, of 2009 for me GParted is great for Linux.

 

I'm back with an update, and unfortunately another problem along with it . I was planning on resizing the partition of the 233gb Hard Drive today using Partition Wizard, so I decided to create a new backup image of the drive first. The computer has been in use of the past few days, and changes have been made so I felt a new backup was necessary before messing with the partition.

So anyway, I fired up SP Recovery Environment, and attempted to make a new fresh backup. I came back a while later, and noticed that the backup job had failed after only running for a few minutes. So I tried again and this time it failed after about 35 minutes. So, now I don't understand what is going on. Why does it keep failing?

Here's what I've done on this machine since the first time I made an image of it a few days ago. I have ran a defrag on the drive using the Windows built-in function, and I have run chkdsk /f after a reboot. I also found Acronis True Image 9 installed which I wasn't aware of. I didn't use add/remove to uninstall it, but I did some research to find out how to manually remove it. I followed the instructions from this link. After rebooting, I installed SP Desktop (the trial). Then I shut down, and booted to my Recovery Environment Disc. And here I am now, stumped as to why the backup is failing.

EDIT: I tried shrinking the partition of a different hard drive on a different PC using Partition Wizard Boot CD. When I choose the size, click ok, and then apply, it gives me error code 36 and says the file system has errors, run check file system. I tried to click check file system in PW but it is greyed out. I checked the PW knowledge base and it says that the drive must have a drive letter assigned to it in order to run check file system. My drive doesn't show a letter in PW, just a * next to it. However in windows it shows as drive C. The change letter function in PW is also greyed out. Ugh....everything is broken today .

 

For the backup issue, did you check the "Details" link under the RE's Task Manager tab?

As for the PW issue, I've never seen that before??

 

Yes I did check the details tab, though right now I don't remember exactly what it said the problem was. I am now on my third attempt at imaging the drive, and there's only about 30 minutes left to go. It has been going for about 2 hours now, so we'll see what happens. If it fails again, I will post up the details.

For the PW issue... The drive that I tried PW on, has Windows 7 32 bit installed on it. I have given that system very limited use since installing 7 on it several months ago, and there isn't much software on the system either. The drive was also formatted with Active@ Kill Disk, prior to installing that OS. So I would consider it to be an extremely clean drive. There is only one thing that I can think of that could have possibly had this effect on the drive in PW, but I don't know. When preparing to install Windows 7 in the install disc menu(where you create partitions), it made two partitions. The first one was about 100mb and the second one was about 160gb(the rest of the drive's space). In that menu, I merged the tiny partition into the large one, so that there would be just one partition(full size of the drive). I don't believe that should have had any effect on my drive in Partition Wizard Boot CD, but I may be wrong.

 

Alright so the backup of the drive worked this time. It's kinda odd that it failed the first two times though. I also verified the backup and that went smoothly as well. I now want to shrink the partition of the XP drive that I just backed up using PW. If I do this, and I lose data or the drive wont boot, will restoring the image of this drive using SP allow it to boot again? Would that require any other steps?

EDIT: I just finished shrinking the XP drive's 230gb partition down to 140gb using PW. Everything went smoothly, though one odd thing that I noticed was that in PW the drive letter on this machine is shown as *. This is the same issue that I had with PW on my other machine, although I didn't get any check file system error, or assign drive letter error on this machine. I have a feeling that what allowed PW to work on this machine and not the other one, is that I ran a defrag(windows built-in) and chkdsk /f on this drive prior to modifying the partition size.

The next thing I want to do is make a new image of the XP drive, and attempt to restore it to a 160gb drive on another machine (now that the XP partition is small enough to fit). I'll be doing this to try out the HIR feature that's included in ShadowProtect. Before imaging I will create a checksum file using HashCheck, of the critical data/pictures that this drive contains. After restoring the image to the 160gb drive, I will verify those data files with HC.

 

I have now attempted to restore the image to a 160gb drive on different hardware twice and it has failed both times. With 32 minutes left I heard a single loud click sound, followed by the ETA and progress bar both stopping and no longer moving. I heard this click sound on both failed restore attempts. SP was not frozen though because I could move the mouse and click buttons. After a few minutes of waiting, the restore process finally stopped completely, the status changed to failed, and the error messages came up. After the error messages had come up, I went over to Disk Map to check if SP still see's my drives. SP could still see my image drive(external 640gb SATA), but the destination drive(internal 160gb IDE) was longer listed in Disk Map.

I'm guessing the error's were caused by this drive suddenly disappearing?? And I'm guessing the loud click sound that I heard was made by this drive when it disappeared?? Anyway, the error messages are listed below. I hope somebody can help me out here.

Module: sbrest
Code: 503
Message: Fatal I/O error on \\volume{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx} a44fe1200 on write {-2 The system cannot find the file specified.)

Module: (loader)
Code: 504
Message: Final error (-109 The pipe has been ended.)

Module: sptask
Code: 516
Message: sbrun.exe started successfully but failed to complete the task