Hard drive no more bootable after "creating Acronis Secure Zone"

Hello world, I need your help. Even the Acronis tech support got stuck in this.


Using True Home Image 2009, I was in the process of manually creating an Acronis Secure Zone of 35GB out of the C: drive of 55GB, when the system asked for a reboot. The problem is the system never came back.

More strangely, the computer now not just does not boot at all by itself, it can not even boot to the manufacturer's recovery/installation CD. When I try to do so, I would see the message of "Inspecting hardware configuration" or something like that, and the hard drive light would make the last flash, the message disappear, and the screen go blank, dead, dark.

Though I can still boot to an True Home Image CD, from there I can see 35GB unallocated hard drive space, and the 55-35=20GB (roughtly) C: drive space with 16GB "stuff" and 4GB free space. Another strange thing: when I go for "Backup" operation, there is nothing showing under C:\.

Anybody out there got any ideas? I'd highly appreciate it.

 

Very strange that it would not boot from the makers recovery CD but would boot from the True Image CD. Is there a reason that you want to use a SZ rather than another hard drive for Backups?
I don't have a solution that would save your existing boot CD. If no one else has suggestions you might have to FDisk and reformat the drive.

 

Thanks, DwnNdrty. I wanted to create the ASZ for storing backups and running Try&Decide.

I kind of think it did not pass the "inspecting hardware configuration" in booting to the recovery CD because of something messsed up with the hard drive, though it's strange it would not return any messages but just go dead.

Since the BIOS and the True Image both at least still show the hard drive, I'm still hoping maybe something can be done from within ATI to fix the problem.

 

A few more thoughts ... does that makers Recovery CD boot in another computer? If you can get a BartPE cd, boot with it and see if it shows anything on your C drive (use the A43 File Management utility in its menu).

I think you will find that most forum members here do not use T&D. There are easier ways to do the same thing.

 

Is this xp or vista? xp is fairly easy to fix, vista is more complicated but still fixable.

First do a chkdsk c: /f , maybe your c: system files got corrupted during the shutdown. When you used the true image bootcd and nothing showed under the c: partition, that can mean it's corrupted. A corrupted partition will sometimes show up as RAW or unpartitioned.

If that doesn't fix it.
From my understanding the securezone writes to the MBR, a Fixmbr/fixboot might be able to fix that by rewriting a new MBR. Don't worry it won't make your problem worst. A fixmbr/fixboot won't touch your c: partition.

As long as your c: partition is intact, which it probably is, you can get it to boot again. Don't reformat your drive until you exhaust every option.

 

DwnNdrty: That recovery CD worked with another computer. What's "a BartPE cd, boot with it and see if it shows anything on your C drive"?

I feel this Acronis True Image is kind of rough, not well developed yet. After running into some bugs here and there, now I just stay with the very basic things only.


jonyjoe81: It's XP/SP3. I don't have some basic utilities handy to do more checking. How can I get to run chkdsk c: /f, etc?

Acronis Tech Support sent me the Fixmbr/fixboot *.iso file which I burnt to a CD to run, but it did not seem to fix the problem - But I'm not sure whether I do it right. I remember seeing some error messages. Maybe I'll try again.

Thanks, guys.

 

It might be just coincidence, but I suspect you need a new optical drive. Google for BartPE cd - very useful to have and it's free. The basic features of True Image work very well. It's when you try to use the "bells and whistles" that things tend to go wrong.

 

Thanks, DwnNdrty. Could you explain why I may need a new optical drive?

Mine is a Motion Computing LE1600 tablet PC without an built-in CD drive. The manufacturer asked me to plug in an externally powered, external USB CD drive. I use a HP dvd movie writer dc3000 (kind of old, but I assume the basic CD-ROM function should be just about the same).

Things continue to behave the same strange way: I made a BartPE cd and tried it, getting about the same thing:

=> message "Setup is inspecting hardware configuration ..."
=> harddrive light flashes once
=> screen goes blank
=> no more responses, though power is still on, fan may turn on (It's a hot day today).