My tale of woe

I read an article that says that TI9 beats Ghost all hollow, I downloaded the trial version and it seemed to make backups to my external usb harddrive quite rapidly. I ordered the full version and upgraded it to the latest build.

I made an image of my ACER laptop c drive onto said external drive. When I went to restore it, it rebooted and I chose the full version. First surprise, my usb drive does not show up anywhere.

I copied the files to my d:drive and tried again. I had selected to check before and after and when I saw that it was going to take a long time, I canceled out.

My computer will no longer boot.

Alt F10, which usually takes me to erecovery on that computer no longer works.

Ran oem recovery disks with idea of restoring c: drive with backup I had made. Apparently the process changed the size of the Cartition and the restore was stuck in a 3 gig partition, D: was now recognized as C: and there was a lot of free space.

Booted with partition commander, should have just resized that partition and deleted the other but i wanted to run acronis on it to restore it as it was, so I resized it and went on.

I still had the d: partition with the acronis images on it so I initiated a restore again. It got down to about 3 minutes in the process and then said it was corrupt.

have tried to use various sets of restore disks, oem and self made, to various sizes of partitions, too large for target it says.

If I ever do get this to work, my original, handy, built in recovery method is gone forever, ACER does not support recovering it, so I am sol on that score. Hopefully this one will finally work and do basically the same thing.

I have NEVER had this much trouble with Ghost and am almost sorry I didn't just spring for it.

Any comments?

 

I'm not sure if you said that you booted the Acer using the Acronis Boot Cd, did you? If not, that is what you should try. Although if you cannot boot the Acer now, you will have to instal Acronis True Image on another system and make the Bootable Rescue CD on it, then run the CD on the Acer.

When you run it on the Acer check if it can see your usb drive.

 

Hello Lost in Space,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please make sure that you use the latest build (2337) of Acronis True Image 9.0 which is available at: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/updates/

To get access to updates you should create an account at:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/my/
then log in and use your serial number to register your software.

As Chutsman said above, please create the bootable rescue media with the latest build of Acronis True Image 9.0, boot your computer from it and try to restore an image from your partition D at first.

If the problem persists, please try to restore your image from the external hard drive in rescue mode.

If Acronis True Image 9.0 does not detect your external hard drive in rescue mode, please boot your computer from the Acronis True Image rescue disc and press F11 key when the selection screen appears. After you get the "Linux kernel command line" prompt, please modify it in the following way:

quiet acpi=off noapic, click on the OK button and choose "Full Version".

If that does not help, please create Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Please also create Acronis Report in the way described below:

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;
- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;
- Boot the computer from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;
- Collect the report file from the floppy.

Please create an account, then log in and 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 the solution.

Thank you.
--
Tatyana Tsyngaeva

 

I went round and round with this bad boy but have got it going.

When I was attempting to make the original restore I made some changes to the screen that was talking aout freespace before and after the partion I was restoring. It was late and I was thinking that, "Yes, there is all sorts of free space left in that partition, after the data, before the next partition. In retrospect, I think I should have left that button alone. As I said, as well, there were boxes I checked to verify stuff before and after the procedure, as well. I started it up, saw it was going to take a while to finish and decided I didn't want to continue and pressed the cancel button.

Apparently, some changes were made in spite of the fact that I had cancelled out. A popup or some other message might be in order, explaining that changes have been made and that might cause a system difficulties if the process is not allowed to continue.

What apparently happened is that my drive was altered to create a small. non bootable partition in place of C:, then there was free space, then a partition that had been the d:. I don't know WHERE the hidden recovery partition got off to , but it was no longer visible. On second thought, it may have been that it was the small partition I saw...anyway.

When I used the system restore disks that came with the laptop, it had room to put everything in the small partition, but it was not bootable. When I did the alt F10 thing, though, it would boot, but there was barely enough room in there for xp to live in.

Using the bootable partioning software, I deleted the small partition and made another which included the free space, and made it bootable. I then DID boot with the TI boot disk and used the backup in the old d: drive to restore it. It got down to a few minutes and then said something about being corrupt.

Then I decided to use a Ghost image I had created with the original recovery procedure that the computer had come with. It was 'Too large for target' so, subsequently, was the manufacturer restore disks.

I then deleted all the partitions and created one only and booted with an xp disk and had it format the whole thing. At that point I decided to use the system restore disks, which worked now, and I reinstalled TI and, using my external drive, 'plugged in' my back up of C:and cherry picked everything I wanted from it and put it back onto my new installation.

I am using the 'secure zone' or whatever it is called, from TI now as well, in place of my now wiped out and gone forever original backup and recovery method that was installed on this computer.

So...Why wasn't my external usb drive recognized when ti booted up? I didn't try it from the boot disk yet, does anyone know if it would then be recognized, or what procedure would be needed to make it so, if it wasn't?

It appears that TI is notorious for having backups that are judged to be corrupt, either on internal drives, external and on removeable media. To be fair though, a Ghost back up on dvd I tried somewhere in here said it was corrupt, as well. What is up with that? It is somewhat dangerous to have your only reliable backup installed on the very drive you may need to recover. In case of a hardware failure, one would be up the creek. It is interesting to note that I was able to move stuff from the 'plugged in' drive version of my backup and get what I needed but that is not much more handy than any of a number of backup programs availale, many of them free.

 

Well, thank you. I have it going now. For future info, though, is that how to get the program to recognize external usb drives?

 

I also learned the hard way not to stop a restore once it has started. To be fair, it has to get rid of the old stuff to put in the new stuff so it is not surprising that once you start your disk is changed.

Another good trick is to always select Verify Image before Restoring even if you verified it when you created it. This way TI9 won't do anything to your old structure if it can't find/verify the image.

As for your USB woes, well, that is why I don't bother with USB. Sooner spend the $ and put a second HD in a system or backup to a network drive.

 

Be aware that TI has it's problems with firewire too - on my Maxtor external drive TI spends ten minutes
scanning the drive and then fails it with a "failed to read from sector" message. Still unresolved in latest build.
Switch the Maxtor over to USB and it works fine.
This has been an ongoing problem and I've seen\heard many reports of it either with USB or firewire on external drives.

USB is not the problem - obviously it is a well-established and functional platform.
Excluding the use of junk discount hubs and basic laptop power issues USB is fast and reliable.
Backup software has long struggled with these common interfaces - despite the overwhelming
majority of other applications working perfectly with them.

Kills me when people denounce a well proven technology and the many benefits it offers
based on software that we pay for, and then are forced to become beta testers and
update with endless "latest versions" instead of simply being able to use.

NAS and internal drives certainly have many more issues and potential for problems than a simple USB connection.
Sorry but people read that and actually think USB or whatever is somehow universally defective - rubbish.

 

Fair enough, USB works very well for some things but given the problems R/W multi-GB files to the devices I have no intention of jumping on-board and I don't think it is purely a TI issue. Having to make sure I have a NEC USB chipset isn't confidence inspiring either and this has been reported elsewhere having nothing to do with Acronis.

I am not trashing USB in general, I have various USB devices that work very well but doing backups with it isn't my first choice.

 

Your point is taken, however, I HAD checked that button and the one to verify after, as well. Since it was going to take awhile to do that, and I wanted to go to bed, I opted out of the whole process, when it gave me an estimate of the time involved, assuming that no changes had yet been made.

You know what they say about assuming though, don't you?

 

"If Acronis True Image 9.0 does not detect your external hard drive in rescue mode, please boot your computer from the Acronis True Image rescue disc and press F11 key when the selection screen appears. After you get the "Linux kernel command line" prompt, please modify it in the following way:

quiet acpi=off noapic, click on the OK button and choose "Full Version"."

My external drive was recognized. Thank you for the info.