HELP! This is the second HD TI killed

Okay...still can't hurt to try COPYWIPE since the program is FREE. Download size is under 600KB. Make sure you download COPYWIPE FOR DOS, and not COPYWIPE FOR WINDOWS. Use BINGBURN (also free) or equivalent to burn the ISO file to your CD if you don't have a floppy drive.

Reboot the COPYWIPE media with the BIOS set to first boot from the floppy/ROM drive. You can download the .PDF instruction at the Terabyte website.

 

Spinrite 6 is an excellent utility to help in the recovery of corrupted disks.
It can repair sectors, and resurrect disks, which even manufacturer's diagnostics say can't be fixed. The disk itself may infact never really have a physical problem, just it's low level format or other info may have been corrupted. I have seen this situation due to an intermittent loose IDE connection. When such hardware problems occur then such bad sectors may exist on the disk without Windows being aware.

If the NTFS file system is being used and Microsoft Windows finds a problem when attempting to write a sector it may decide that the sector is permanently damaged and will lock out the cluster from use by Windows. Such clusters are recorded in the NTFS file system structure.
If one runs Chkdsk then at the end it will show 'xxxxxx bad sectors' to indicate there are bad sectors which Windows will no longer use.

The important point to note is that SpinRite 6 may fix the bad sectors on the disk but any bad sectors flags in the NTFS file structure are not removed. Microsoft Windows, and consequently TrueImage, still regard the sectors as bad.

 

The thing with being able to change the size of the hard drive is a system called HPA - basically you can use HPA so that the disk controller 'lies' about the size of the hard drive to the pc's bios.

It can easily be turned on or off and some manufacturers use it to store things like recovery images or important software so that it can't accidentally be deleted by the user.

Dells can sometimes have a few things going on partition wise

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm

the pc doesn't see the hpa area, windows doesn't, nor will acronis, ghost, part magic etc - so it is feasable that the disk structure of some Dell's could have had something to do with this problem - don't know! especially when doing a clone and with proportional copying.

more dell links

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/index.htm

some pc manufacturers also use the hpa function to cripple drives - say you have an 80gb drive that is returned under warranty but the manufacturer only has 120gb drives ready for sending out, they sometimes use hpa to reduce it's size down to 80gb - wouldn't want you getting something for nothing!!!

 

I'd like to see what happens with the current or immediately previous build of version 9. This is an older build, and the computer is new enough to have SATA drives. Therefore, downloading a current build should have been the first step.

If the problem exists with the two most recent builds, then it's an Acronis problem. Until that is known, the problem may have already been solved.