Problem with new external drive

Hi,

I've been an extremely satisfied registered user of Acronis True Image 7.0 Personal for almost 2 years now, using most of each features and never having had any problems, running under XP.

Now I have a problem I can't solve. Previously, I used a Maxtor 250 GB external drive, connected via a USB 2.0 card in my PCMCIA notebook slot. The .tib files went into my external hard drive. Worked every time.

Now - believe it or not - I ran out of space with so many backups, and bought a new Maxtor One-Touch III with Firewire 800 connection and a new Firewire 800 card for my PCMCIA slot (made by Delock), for faster speed. Everything works fine with this setup as well - except Acronis True Image!

When I turn on Acronis with the hard disk running, it crashes immediately at setup.

When I turn on the hard disk after I've started True Image, it doesn't crash. The one thing it will let me do successfully is mount an image (also from the external drive). But woe if I try to either backup or restore a partition: it will as go all right as far as the last "proceed" before it would actually start working. Then the program crashes, however! The kind of crash where you can send a report to Microsoft (which, of course, is completely useless except maybe for MS statistics). This even happens when I try to back up a partition from my internal drive to a partition in my internal drive! The moment I switch off my new 500GB external drive, everything is fine again.

With my old 250GB drive, none of these problems occur or ever occurred.

The same thing happens when I attach my new drive via USB 2.0 (it takes that as well): everything works except Acronis.

I am a bit puzzled. I tried my external drive with a friend, who has Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1 running on his computer and the same thing happens, so an update would not solve the problem.

Any ideas what the problem might be? I would be grateful!

Best regards, Detlef Hardorp

 

I do not have an answer to your firewire driver problem but I would like to know how many backup images you have on your USB drive and if you really need all of them.
A work around would be to delete some of the older backups so you could protect your current system and data until your problems with the new drive are solved.
FWIW I keep a total of ten full images which is more than enough for me.

Xpilot

 

No answer from me either but if it were mine and I was stuck, I would partition the new 500GB drive into 2x250GB drives and see if that helps. No good reason but 500GB is a fairly new large size and TI does access drives via its "drivers" so it might be worth a try. However, it really is in the "guess and try" category!

 

It's not just the images, which I periodically delete in so far as they concern my operating system and other data. It's my photos that are taking up so much space - plus their backups. I want to reuse my old 250GB external drive for backups only and put everything else (like the originals) on the new drive. Now I don't want to delete either my original photos nor their backups! And backups on DVD's are not very useful when you have over a 100 GB in photo data ... Detlef

 

Thanks for the ideas, but my 500 GB drive is already partitioned into about 8 smaller logical drives (between 50 and 100 GB big). Detlef

 

Even though you have over 100Gb of photos, I wouldn't have them backed up via True Image alone. If just one byte of that backup image goes awry, guess what! Have you ever tested a Restore from any of those backups to make sure they work?
If you haven't already done this, make the bootable Rescue CD and see if you get the same result with that new 500Gb firewire drive. BTW, firewire was problematic with older versions of TI but I don't use firewire so I don't know if the problem was solved with newer versions.

 

I certainly agree, but since most photo files are already compressed, a TI backup won't be much smaller or even larger. It makes more sense to just copy the files to the backup location.

 

I think you have proven that Acronis True Image version 7 and Workstation 9.1 are incompatible with this new drive. The fact that you used two different computers with the same result is pretty definitive.

You could try downloading the trial version of TI 10 Home and see if that supports this new hardware. I'm not optomistic that it will, but that's about all that you have left to try.

A search of this forum for One-Touch doesn't reveal others using the III version of the One-Touch, but searching OneTouch finds several reports of problems with the model III. See this thread for the best info: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=124706&highlight=OneTouch

Note that none of these problems were reported by people using TI 10, so that's still something to try.

If you haven't tried the Recovery CD as Ziggy71 suggests, definitely try that and let us know what happens, but my guess is that it won't work either from the earlier reports.

 

I'm a fairly new user of Acronis products (TI10 and DD10) and have been trying to sort out several problems myself, not the same problems you're having, just getting error messages. I also have an new external firewire 800 drive (LaCie with USB2.0, firewire 400 and firewire 800 interfaces) and a SIIG interface card. I have run the drive on all interfaces and of course the firewire 800 is by far the fastest. I agree with Ralphie that, although it shouldn't be necessary, the bootable Rescue CD is probably the best way to go, although not quite as convenient. Running from the live CD I have been able to image to the external drive with no problems. Haven't yet tried to do a restore, so don't know if any problems will occur there. Don't have any good answers for you but thought I'd second the idea of trying the rescue CD to see if you get any improvement.

 

Hello,

thanks for all those helpful responses! Particularly the one with the reference to the Onetouch III forum, were a similar problem was reported back in March of last year, with Acronis support saying they have already solved the problem and will announce the update ... I wonder if that ever happened!

Now I tried working from the bootable CD. Everything works fine there! No problems. However, it takes at least twice as long: for a bit over 4 GB on a partition, with a USB 2.0 connection, I need 14 Minutes with XP, but twice that (with the firewire 800 card) and three times that long (with the USB 2.0 card) doing it from the Acronis OS on the CD. But this was always the case working from the CD. You can't expect anything but the most basic drivers to work from there and you can't adjust them either. And - of course - you're computer can do nothing but backup when you work from a CD ... But at least it works.

A few more remarks:
1. I always verify my backup files!
2. It is worthwhile backing up my pictures to file, as my RAW pictures are not compressed much.

Best regards,
Detlef

 

Hi Detlef,

I'm glad you have a way to backup even though it is less convenient than working within Windows and slower.

You might try the TI version 10 and see if that is compatible with the One-Touch III under Windows. I would backup before installing 10 and then restore the backup if it doesn't work.

I don't know whether RAW files will be compressed. You could always just give it a try using the Files and Folders backup.

 

Hello,

well, the problem is solved! Acronis suggested that I try a trial version of True Image Work Station 9.1 myself. I just did - and there are no problems! (The friend I had tried that with with must be running an older version.)

So I will now purchase this software.

Thanks for all your help.

Best regards, Detlef