many complications new HP comp + TI8 - please read

Here is an email I just sent to Acronis. I thought maybe those of you on the forum would find it interesting or have some thoughts on it.
EMAIL TO ACRONIS:
Dear Acronis Technical Support,
I still need additional help to get your software to work for me. How can you expect to have a successful company if your main product will not even work easily with a brand new HP Pavilion computer? When I start True Image 8.0 (build 937) I am confronted with a cryptic DOS-like prompt that has the word “quiet” already typed. Why on earth must a user of your latest version and a new HP computer be confronted with such a strange situation…and with no reference to that in the user manual? The first time I tried using the system to restore an image, I just deleted the word “quiet” and click on “OK”. Then I saw a long, long list in DOS style on my screen. Then it stopped and presented me with a DOS type prompt. I typed “help”, then hit enter. Then it gave me a menu. Then I typed “exit” at the prompt, then the True Image program started. I chose “restore image” and went through the steps of successfully restoring an image that I had on my connected USB external hard drive. When talking to a member of the Acronis User’s Forum, I was told I had type “acpi=off noapic” after the word “quiet”. The next time I tried to do a test restore I typed that and hit enter. It brought up the True Image program. When I started the Restore Image process, it did not offer me my USB external drive in the list of drives to restore an image from! Why all of With a new HP computer and the latest version of your software this should be simple.
Another question: In the process of testing the different ways of archiving and restoring an image (so I can feel confident that I have a few ways to recover from a disaster), I tried making copies of the image files (*.tib) from my USB external hard drive, to DVDs. I did so, but when I tried to copy them back to the USB external drive, they would not copy. I got a message “cannot copy (file name): disk structure is corrupted and unreadable”. Of course I tried this to make sure that if somehow my C drive AND my USB external drive both went bad or got destroyed I would have a copy of the image files that I could copy back onto a new external drive, the restore to a new C drive from those.
As you can see, I am still very insecure about any potential disaster recovery I may need to perform, because of these mysterious and complicated things. PLEASE tell me how I can do these things simply, or provide me with an update of your software so I can end this long and complicated process of trying to successfully make use of your software. This should help your company too, since HP computer is one of the three top selling brands (along with the Emachine and Dell brands)!
Thank you.

 

As someone who used to sell/repair/support computers, I can tell you that many brand name machines can be a nightmare to sort out as they often have vendor specific software as well as having OEM'd their versions of Windows.

As some of this software is not available retail, or in the version of Windows that you may trot off and buy in a shop, it can cause some very strange side effects in 3rd part software which is not so easily sorted.

Many years ago, HP had a Pavilion bundled with all the normal software adn they also had a flatbed scanner with SCSI interface. Strangely HP never tested the two pieces of hardware - with the result that the HP photo software on the computer caused a general protection fault when the scanner was used, followed upon reboot by the system freezing. Even more strange HP after identifying the problem never advertised this to their customers. The work around being loading the version of photo imaging on the scanner CD after deleting the version bundled with the computer.

This also only related to 3 models in a range for the AP region, not in the US or Europe.

This is one reason why new editions of software appear to misbehave badly for some people and others have absolutley no problem what so ever.

Ah yes I use an HP laptop - try enabling legacy USB if your BIOS has that option. I had to upgrade my BIOS and strangely the Synaptics mouse pad before the boot disk would recognise my USB drive for v8

Colin