OS Selector - Read error sect 0, HD 3

Ok.. Here is one that I just can not understand.

I have a Dell Dimension XPS Gen 3 Box. It runs XP Sp2. I have 2 SATA gen 1 drives (160 gb each).

I have a 39MB diagnostic partition and then my C: drive.

When I enter Acronis OS Selector from boot it gives me an error stating that it has an error on sector 0 of hard drive 3. Occasionally I also get a error on sector 0 of hd 0. But mainly the first.

If I enter into Disk Director from the OSS screen it shows me a hard drive 3 with 25.xx GB of space. I don't have a third disk.

I have uninstalled OSS, reinstall OSS.. However I can not seem to run OSS or Disk Director from the rescue media. I have made three disks and once the boot up and I select any of the menu items I get a blinking cursor in the upper left corner of the screen.

How do I get rid of drive 3? The one that does not exist?

I was really hoping that Acronis had their stuff corrected. I am an old time owner of True Image, however they could not ever get it to run on my XPS. I kept explaining that it may be due to the SATA drives and a needed driver, however tech support gave up and they offered me a choice of a different application.

Acronis.. Please tell me you have a fix for such and issue and I did not waste the money again.

 

Hello cwpippin,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Could you please let us know the case number of your request if you have contacted our Support Team earlier so we could look through your problem investigation?

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko

 

Well for the benefit of those who have this issue I would like to offer what my resolution was.

First let me say that I did everything that has been proposed here only to find that OSS would still show a 3rd hard drive of some odd size (869 GB) that was not on my system.

I decided to abandon OSS and try BootIt NG. Oddly enough BootIt NG also showed a 3rd hard drive but could not validate a size. However, unlike OSS, BootIt NG did not show error messages on boot up and as such was not an issue.

While attempting to load Ubuntu 6.06 on my machine I found that I had too many primary partitions on my drives to accomodate another OS. So I decided to grab my external USB/FIRWIRE case that I used to have my DVD burner in and place an old 120GB PATA drive in.

To make a long story short, once that was installed I was able to install Ubuntu and all worked. However I was a little unhappy as I did not want to pay for another boot manager since I already had OSS.

I deativated BootIt NG and reinstalled OSS. OSS now operated properly and picked up my installation of Ubuntu on the external hard drive. So.. I did an experiment. I removed the external hard drive and.. tada.. the same error showed up on a reboot.

So.. I do not know where in the bios, mbr or any metadata this entry for my external drive would exist but it does/did and the only fix for me is to have it connected to keep from getting the error on boot.

So.. Any ideas why and where this entry would be in the boot loader for NT? I have no entry at all in BIOS.

 

Hello cwpippin,

Could you please create Acronis Report on the same machine having this external hard drive connected and disconnected 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 submit a request for technical support. Attach both report files to your request along with the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko