Dynamic drives and Acronis

Hi everyone

We recently had a failure of a computer HDD (lost everything, of course) which prompted me to begin exploring backup software and led me to try out Acronis. I acquired an external 300GB eSATA HDD for the backup hardware. I have a demo of Acronis but when I attempt to create a backup it says:

"The backup archive file will be created on the dynamic volume. Please note that you will not be able to restore this backup archive when booting from the rescue media. Are you sure you want to continue with this procedure? "

Now, after searching the forums it appears that I can convert the dynamic disk to a basic disk to make work for backup. Does the error message mean that if the system were to crash, I could not restore from a backup file created on this dynamic disk?

Thanks for any replies, sorry if I missed an obvious answer somewhere - just post a link to it.

 

Yes, you would not be able to restore since the rescue environment does not understand dynamic disks and therefore can't read the archive.

 

OK new problem:

The initial backup attempt I tested before switching from dynamic worked fine. I had no errors other than the one mentioned above as it started the backup process.

I converted the disk to a basic disk and formatted it (full, NTFS).

Now when I start Acronis I get an error message: "failed to read from the sector 63 of hard disk X"

If I ignore one message, it just picks another sector and gives me the error. If I ignore all and start a backup the backup process appears to start correctly. While this might work if I wanted to start the process manually every time, this will not work for an early AM scheduled backup when no one is around to tell it to ignore the issue.

This is a brand new disk that functioned with Acronis before conversion and formatting. Windows still sees the disk just fine and it appears to operate normally.

If it makes any difference, the disk is an eSATA Seagate 300GB in an Icy Dock station.

 

Hello BackupNewbie,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please notice that this message most likely means the disk has bad sectors.
Please check the disk for errors by issuing the command "chkdsk X: /r" from Start -> Run

If the issue persists, please collect some information to let us investigate it thoroughly:

- Please download Acronis drivers;
- Replace C:\WINDOWS\system32\snapapi.dll with the one from the downloaded SnapAPI archive;
- Reproduce the issue and collect the log file without closing any application windows (including the error message windows if there are any). The log file will be created at C:\ . The name of the log file will be snapapi [date-time].log

Please create Acronis Report as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Please also collect the exact vendor and device names of the hard drive in question.

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov