Good, no, GREAT NEWS for all of us ICH9R chipsets

As Acronis knows, and as we all know, ATI 11 and ATI 11 would not permit us to create usable bootable media or use the F11 Secure Recovery Environment. For the year or so this has been going on, we've resorted to becoming friends with our favorite auto mechanic, Mustang, and some guy named Bart... and even then, I HATED those solutions (good as they were) over the simplicity afforded by F11. it allowed me take risks with new software and if I didn't like it, I didn't have to muck up my registry as it quickly becomes festooned with uninstall debris. Basically F11 and a quick recovery CD that need not boot into a windows enviornment of any kind was a better solution, for me, than uninstalling programs, games even, until your registry is so bloated that you have to reinstall windows, the very thing we are all here trying to avoid.

I could go on much much longer about what used to be wrong True Image, but instead, I am happier now with Acronis than I was years ago... so a few words about what Acronis did right, and why our ICHR/Jmicron/Sata/this morhterboard, that motherboard, etc... headaches are over. You see, Acronis ECHO Workstation 9.5, released less than one month ago, took care of all this business. [note to Acronis, use the same boot configuration for the Home line of products and you should be home free]. So, it works, all of it. and what's more, is that there is MORE OF IT. No buggy, byzantine, services such as Try and Decide and no slow backup/restores this time. In other words, it works. Which would have been okay for a "fix", but so much more value has been added that for a very low price (49 dollars ... I'll explain in the next paragraph) we get what we've always been wanting... PLUS, the ability to include Universal Restore, Snap Deploy (boy is it fun to type this while my restore completes rather than cheer on some green bar slowly making its way to 100%. And then there are the not so little, little things. For example, for ***** and giggles, I backed up to the secure zone and it gave me to option to duplicate the backup, effectively placing a second .tib on one of my other, non-hidden drives.

And since we were all having problems with v10 and then v11, its safe to assume that we all purchased them. So here is where the cost savings come in. If you buy the upgrade version it is 49 dollars and not 79 dollars. So for 49 dollars, we can get something that (i) works with our chipsets (ii) briskly (iii) and includes very useful improvements/new features, as well as the option to create a WinPE boot disk, right from your start menu.

It seems they got it right this time. So home users thinking about buying another program from another vendor (I know I was)... it looks like Acronis put their money where their mouth is and made a product that you'd be crazy not to buy. It doesn't just work as good as it used to, it works better in every imaginable way.

Here is what MAY be the one wrench in the works. I also own Disk Director Suite, and had it installed BEFORE the new installation of Echo. Echo was unable to so much as open the bootdisk creation module... I am guessing its was because Disk Director and OSS had the old Boot configuration and made a conflict between the two programs. BUT,I have now instaled ATI on a machine where Disk Director has not been installed. Hopefully, installing Disk Director second, I will be able to get OSS back, the ATI bootdisk maker will recogine. If this works, then Acronis Echo Workstation 9.5 will be our holy grail.

Great Job!!!

Final note to Acronis: after purchase of Echo WS 9.5 and "Univ. Rest.9.5" both advertised as build 8076, I received both products... only Univ. Restore was build 8018 (or something like that) and would not install on Echo8076. As a logistical matter, you may want to correct the link and point it to the proper build.

Thanks again! I will let you know if I can get Disk Director Suite on the bootable media which I can only hope would use the boot files from Echo 9.5, therefore providing us with a bootable rescue disk with for True Image that