Deep Trouble

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by pollyanna, Apr 3, 2006.

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  1. pollyanna

    pollyanna Registered Member

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    Hello there....Quite a while back I bought a copy of Acronis TI8 and with help from you folks, I got it installed and made an image of my c:\ drive. Saved it to the hard drive and burned it on to 4 dvds. Also made a cd rescue disk and tested it. Then put it away in a save place and felt good about it......until the other day when my No 1 computer got so sick that I can hardly get anything useful out of it. And what is worse is that I don't think I can get Acronis into it to put the image in.

    I'm writing this on an elderly backup but the sick machine is quite a good one...I'll put some details at the bottom of this note. The sick one was clean up to the start of this mess and I had only ran AVG, Ad- Aware and Spybot a day or so before and got an OK from them all. I've since checked it out with those three in safe mode with restore switched off with the same result.


    The first thing to go was my LG Super Multi drive which suddenly would not recognise any sort of CD including commercial music CDs or data disks. For some reason the drive does recognise DVDs and will play or copy stuff as usual.


    Next, the dialler box went blank... so I was off-line. I know there is a dialler wizard some where but the only thing I can find does not have the right boxes to enter the details into.

    A little while after this I found that lots of mouse moves where not good...for instance I can open a folder but any right click shuts down everything, desktop icons and all and leaves just the wallpaper. I can get the icons back with ctrl-alt-delete which asks for a programe name and when I give it one it runs that prog and also all the icons come back. While this is going on a couple of error messages show up, somthing like this.

    "Failed assertion in common CPP at line 186 Error loading signature XML from 'Sigs.xml'
    Windows cannot find '/idlist,:608:1264,C:\Documents

    What worries me is that with the boot priority correctly set amd usuing the rescue disc there is a pause in the booting then it goes ahead and starts up windows as usual. The same thing happens with a Win XP boot disk

    Apart from being unable to use my Acronis image, I can't find a way to even use my Windows disk and attempt to do a Windows repair or even format and start over again. I do hope there is a way out of this and will answer any questions that I can. But I have not enough experience to go into the box and do stuff with the hardware.

    Thanks for any help.....P.


    Win XP
    CPU Pentium 4HT, 3000MHz (!5x200)
    Motherboard Gigabyte GA-81G
    Chipset Intel Springdale-G i865G
     
  2. John Farrar

    John Farrar Registered Member

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    It could be that your CD/DVD drive is faulty though which is why you cannot boot from it with the Rescue CD. Can you change that with the one from your older machine? Does your rescue CD boot in that m/c? If so, then it is likely that the CD/DVD drive is faulty.

    If the CD/DVD drive is OK then this indicates to me that the BIOS is not as it should be so you need to reset the BIOS back to its default. I hope you have a manual for the motherboard that gives details of how to do that.

    Swapping over the CD/DVD drive is not that difficult but you need to ensure that the drive you replace the CD/DVD drive with has the same Master/Slave setting as the 'faulty' one.
    Ask again if you cannot do this.
    Good luck
    John
     
  3. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    I think John is correct. Your CD/DVD drive is suspect or your BIOS settings don't have the Optical drive ahead of the hard drive in boot order.

    If the boot order in the BIOS has the CD/DVD drive before the hard drive, then the CD/DVD drive is probably defective. Relpace it and try again.
     
  4. pollyanna

    pollyanna Registered Member

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    Thanks for the replies folks...it's hard to escape the possibility that the optical drive ia sick, but it's hard to see how it could be causing all the other troubles. I will check the bios again and have another go with the rescue disk. My eyesight is not good enough to switch the hardware around. Is there no other way to dump the whole lot and and format the drive? .....P.
     
  5. Allen L.

    Allen L. Registered Member

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    If your eyesite is good enough to "...dump the whole lot and format the drive", and therefore reading the typeface on your monitor, I would put on some very strong glasses and try first to switch the hardware, as it is a much bigger object compared to a 12 point typeface and the hardware is almost certainly your problem, and if not that, your BIOS' configurations which is as easy to read as the word "format".

    ...Allen
     
  6. John Farrar

    John Farrar Registered Member

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    Pollyanna.
    I think we are agreed that your CD drive is faulty. Does your rescue disc work in the other PC? If so, then the CD is OK. Therefore; either your CD drive IS faulty or the BIOS is wrong.

    Changing the CD drives over, or fitting a new one as they are very cheap, is really easy enough and you will only need a Phillips head screwdriver. There will be no need to re-format your hardrive and what will that achieve anyway as you will still not be able to restore your backup.

    You say you saved the image to your hardrive. I assume that is not onto the same hardrive/partition you backed up?

    Somehow, you need another CD drive fitted and your problems will be over. Even if you have to pay someone to fit it for you at least you will be up and running about 30 minutes later.
    John
     
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