No Harddisk Detect in ATI 10 Build 4942

Hi

I have a problem when trying to restore my main system partition.

When using ATI 10 and selecting to restore my system partition, the computer reboots and after starting Acronis Loader, the system reboots without restoring my partition..

Thus, to figure out what the problem is, I created the boot media and tried to run.. In Full version, there was no harddisk detected.. In the safe version, I can successfully see the harddisk and complete the restore..

My system configurations are as follows:

P35 Intel Chipset with ICH9R Southbridge
1 x SATA HDD configured in AHCI mode (is that the reason?)
1 x Sandisk HiSpeed USB ThumbDrive

Searching through the forum, I can't seem to find anyone with the same problem except on much older versions of ATI..

Its rather irritading to keep on booting with the Disk in order to restore my HDD..

Anyone with any idea what is the problem?

 

Where do you have the Image you're restoring, the thumb drive?

 

Yeap.. I have it in the Thumb Drive.. But I don't think that should be causing the problem as USB drives are quite common now and I don't think ATI should have any compatitiblity with USB drives?

Thintk he problem might either be the new P35 Chipset or AHCI mode of the HDD..

 

If you have the thumb drive in a front port try it on one of the rear ports on the computer.

 

From my expierence, I believe it has something to do with the sata drive. I've bought 2 sata drives, but don't use them as boot drives because to me they are unreliable. I've have problems like you where I couldn't restore to sata drives (because true image would freeze), when I replaced with an IDE drive, it worked perfectly. I have the latest drivers etc., it's just in my opinion, sata is not yet proven technology that works everytime like IDE. Theres no fix for it. One thing that has worked for me is using a usb2 ide/sata bridge adapter, and from windows restoring the image to the sata drive through the usb bridge. that works for me, but in the end I choose ide as boot drives only.

 

I'm pretty sure the problem is the P35 chipset. It's very new. TI only just added support for the P965 chipset (though still buggy) in the last build and that chipset has been out for quite a while now.

You may want to contact Acronis Support and see if they can provide a custom build for. Otherwise, consider creating a BartPE cd that includes the necessary drivers.

 

Most newer computers (at least my last three) based on newer chipsets no longer allow booting from IDE drives.

 

Yeah.. I thought so too.. But actually, the chipset should not directly affect the harddrive detection.. I mean, isn't it just a matter of developing a generic AHCI/SATA driver?

 

The chipset driver absolutely affects the drive's detection. Even Windows will have this problem if the drivers are not installed (especially where RAID is concerned). Windows drivers are usually way more current. Each chipset accesses the hardware differently so each requires its own driver.

TI uses Linux drivers for chipset support. Until the Linux drivers have been developed there is no direct support. TI Safe Mode accesses the drives through the BIOS using a version of DOS (this is a more generic way and is why drives can ususally be detected this way when full mode doesn't work).

 

As I understand it, you can select ACHI, or IDE(native) mode for your SATA drive in the BIOS. If you select native mode, Windows has drivers built in, and Linux should work also. In ACHI (or RAID mode if available) you have to provide the drivers via F6 when installing Windows and Linux may not have them.

The problem is that if Windows was installed with ACHI enabled, restoring with ACHI NOT enabled may not yield a bootable system.

 

Hi!
The problem is, Acronis True Image does not detect my ACHI HDD in when restoring the HDD UNLESS I use the CD-ROM in SAFE MODE.. That is to say, as long as I did something that require a reboot in True Image, I am unable to accomplish it as it is unable to detect my Harddisk..

I need to use Safe Mode from the CD in order for it to detect my CD...

Any ideas? Acronis-Support?

 

If you use Safe Mode from the TI CD, you can see your hard drive, but can you see the Sandisk USB drive? USB devices usually cannot be seen in TI Safe Mode.

In other words, the problem may be worse that you think. If you have to have the Full mode to see the USB drive, then you need Linux drivers for the SATA ACHI drive in the full mode.

Frankly, I don't understand how TI Safe mode is seeing the SATA ACHI drive when drivers are not installed in Safe mode, but I take your word for it.

If you change the SATA option in BIOS to IDE/native (disable ACHI), can the Full mode from the TI CD see the drive? With this change, the drive will not be bootable if you try to boot from it, and your Window installation could be corrupted, so only try this with the boot CD.

 

My new computers (ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi and MSI P6N SLI-FI) will see USB devices (flash drives, hard drives) when run in the Safe Mode of TI. This is because the BIOS of the computer supports them and shows them as a standard hard drive device.

 

That's very nice. If Full mode is a problem, you can still use USB devices in Safe mode.

Are you using SATA drives in ACHI mode? Can you see them in both Safe and Full mode?

 

Yes, it works well as a fall-back. When I first tested out TI (version 9, build 3,667) on my P5B it would only detect the hard drives in Safe Mode. The latest version of TI 10 (4,942) has support for the P965/JMicron chipset so it now detects the drives in Full mode too. The JMicron support is still buggy though because it errors about 8 times (taking 4 minutes or so) before starting. Acronis Support will not fix this even though I tried repeatedly to get them to. They just said to use the BartPE cd (which I already was).

I have a RAID setup on two drives and two in non-RAID mode which, as far as I know, run in AHCI mode.

USB mode in TI Safe Mode is at USB 1 speeds though, so while it will let you restore in a pinch it's extremely slow. (Restoring from in internal drive is not too bad.) I suspect this is actually a BIOS issue and not a TI issue. Hopefully soon they'll get the BIOS's to support USB 2 devices at full speed.

In any case, I usually use my BartPE flash drive to do restores that can't be done from Windows (which is rare on this computer since I multi-boot and it's much quicker to boot into another Windows and do the restore to the non-active partition).

 

I just built a PC using the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard (which has the Intel P35 Express Chipset), and I also had the problem that the 4942 boot image wouldn't recognize my SATA drives. I'm not using RAID. I fired off a support request asking if they support the SATA controller in the Intel ICH9R Southbridge that's part of this chipset, but then I found this thread. I can confirm that running ATI in safe mode works, my SATA drives are detected just fine. I don't know why, but it does work.

 

I may have spoken too soon. My SATA drives are detected in safe mode, but doing a full backup of a partition that contains only about 18GB of data to another internal SATA drive with no compression is taking forever. Current estimate is 1 hour 50 minutes. This makes it basically unusable for me.

I'll see what Acronis tech support has to say about supporting the P35 chipset.

 

Hello WindBlade and lemondjeff,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please note that as MudCrab said the full variant of the standalone version of Acronis True Image is Linux based and has it's own assortment of drivers for the wide variety of modern hardware. It could be possible that the drivers for the particular device you are using either is not added into the standalone version yet or the existing drivers do not work correctly.

In order to provide you with more information on the issue we would need some additional information from you. Namely, please create Acronis Report and Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post. In addition, please provide the exact vendor and model of the hard drive controller and hard drives you use.

Then 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 a solution.

Note that as MudCrab mentioned, the safe variant of the standalone version of Acronis True Image is based on the DOS environment and works via BIOS. It provides you with access to all devices recognized in BIOS. However, please note that we do not guarantee that the safe version will work correctly with the USB, Fireware, SCSI, RAID drives and network. We recommend you to use the safe variant only if the full one doesn't work.

P.S. Using a BartPE-based bootable CD created using Acronis True Image plug-in for BartPE allows one to boot the computer into a Windows-like environment loading the appropriate drivers for any hardware devices installed in the computer at startup, thus, it can be used as a possible workaround in case you have problems with Acronis True Image Bootable CD.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

Thanks, I was able to create a BartPE image with the Intel ICH9 drivers, and this works correctly.

 

ATI Rescue Disk crashes also when a PATA IDE drive is connected to a P35 (GA-P35C-DS3R)

 

I am setting up a RAID mirrored then striped array (RAID 10 or 0+1) on a GA-P35-DQ6, with three partitions for OS, data & swapfile. This uses the Intel P35 chipset and the ICH9R raid controller. XP SP2.

I've read all the posts about TI and the Intel P35 chipset. Most of these posts are simply about recognising SATA drives, and not much about raid, and nothing about an array being trashed. My problem was as follows. I tried backing up the OS partition to another partition on the array using the "Full" version of TI 10 on the recovery CD, and in so doing it trashed the first physical drive on the array, but of course the array was able to recover, albeit over some hours. I tried the same thing using the "safe" version of TI , and it trashed the entire array. All four physical drives are seen as raid "offline members", and no raid array is seen.

This second more serious instance may have been caused by an incorrect shutdown (I found some references on the net to this sort of problem). After the image creation I shut the system down using the recovery disk shut down option. I hadn't realised that raid arrays were quite so fragile. You'd like to think that there was some raid utility from Intel that would enable you to fix this, but I found almost nothing (a circa 2000 utility for some server raid boards that didn't work for me.)

From some of the above posts it looks like I might be able to get TI to work using a BartPE boot CD with the Intel drivers. At this stage I have no idea whether TI will run correctly when actually installed on the system, when I get to that stage. I suspect that it will create backup images, but at this stage I have grave doubts about its ability to restore them. Ghost 8 seems to work.

So, any insights about TI 10 and raid and P35 would be most welcome, while I start again and test more carefully.

F_P

Edit: Interestingly, in both cases TI found the partitions on the array, created the image and verified the image. It was only when rebooting the system that the raid problems emerged. Also, all physical drives are SATA on the ICH9R controller.

FURTHER EDIT: The BartPE CD with Intel RAID drivers included seems to work. Installing TrueImage on the hard drive however does not. It will work for creating a backup image, but when you try to restore an image using the installed version of TI, it reboots, restores, and trashes the RAID array in the exact same way as the "safe" version on the bootable recovery CD. At least this time I was prepared for it.

 

Am I right saying that TI home does not support raid?
I thought you at least need the Workstation version.


Furthermore, with TI Workstation 9.1, I perfectly can restore my sata/raid0 configuration with (12) diskettes, prepared with the Media Builder (IDE diskette-drive). With a restore-cd (sata cd-writer), the result is:
"Acronis Loader fatal error: Boot drive (partition) not found. ...".

 

That's not my understanding. I know a number of people who use TI with RAID, but not with the new P35/ICH9R controller.

I have had further problems with my raid array. Something else other than TI trashed the entire array again, with the BIOS regarding all the physical disks as "offline members" of some missing array, and not finding any existing array. I can't find a way to recreate the array in such a situation. This is the exact same problem I had when using the "safe" version of TI on the recovery CD. This is puzzing. The "safe" version is supposed to use DOS and the BIOS, so how does it corrupt the array?

The second array corruption occurred when I was installing software in XP. I suspect that it occurred when I installed a Microsoft program called "User Profile Hive Cleanup Service". I was having problems with an extended delay - several minutes - in saving user settings when logging off, but I could still reboot. I suspected some recently installed hardware drivers to be causing the delay, so I installed the Microsoft service. It worked once, and then not for subsequent logoffs. At what I think was the next reboot, the array was gone. I now suspect that the delay was the RAID driver working, and what the MS service did was kill it prematurely, thus corrupting the array.

So what to conclude? Are the Intel RAID drivers buggy? Perhaps. After all, TI should work in "safe" mode, and I don't think that the sorts of delays I experienced in logging off should be normal. Is TI to blame? Perhaps. If Ghost 2003 works, also using DOS and the BIOS, then so should TI in "safe" mode, non?

I think that what I will do is not install the OS on the array. At least that way, I can use TI, and if the array goes belly up again, I can at least boot into Windows and perhaps fix it from there using the Intel Windows RAID drivers.

I'd be keen to read of other experiences with TI / RAID / P35-ICH9R.

F_P

 

I'm not sure.
I based my opinion on the Acronis site, products, where Raid is only mentioned for the Workstation and higher versions.
Furthermore I was not able to boot with diskettes in the home version (didn't find the disks), while in the workstation version it reads the array.

 

I use TI 10 Home (and TI 9 before that) with RAID on my computers without any problems. As long as the RAID drives are recognized and suported correctly, there shouldn't be any problems. It's possible the Workstation version has more RAID drivers or that it is more current. It is geared toward business/corporate users and as such probably gets updated more frequently.

The problem with the P35 chipset is the same problem the P965 chipset had when it first came out. It takes a while for the programs to be updated for the new chipsets. You either live with work-arounds (like BartPE), contact Acronis Support and request a custom ISO, wait for a build with built in support or try a different product.