SATA Work Around - Issue Solved, Kind of!

ATTENTION ACRONIS DEVELOPMENT TEAM!

WD Raptor Serial ATA (SATA) drive issue SOLVED - kind of !!!!

I also for many weeks now could not boot from my Acronis 8.0 Boot CD and I was forced to turned to an alternative program for my image backups; until today!

I'm not going to be so bold as to say this is a fix for this long standing issue but will call it a "Work Around" and only wish the Acronis Development team had offered it to me earlier. But in any case that's water under the bridge, now let's all move forward and see if this "work around" helps others while a permanent fix is soon to come our way, I hope.

I don't want to get to technical, besides I can't, but here's a brief overview of my system; I had purchased a new motherboard called EliteGroup 755-A2, which has both SATA Host Controller and supports IDE channels. For whatever reason I thought this would be a good opportunity to try the NEW, at least for me, a WD Raptor SATA 160GB drive.

I installed the drive at the same time I installed WinXP Pro so it defaulted to the NTFS file system, which was fine by me. I also partitioned the drive to have 2 - 80GB partitions. The plan was of course to have the system on the 1st partition, Drive-C and keep my True Image images on the 2nd partition, Drive - D. Easy, right?

I soon discovered, as many of you have, that after installing True Image and creating a Emergency Boot CD that it would NOT boot. I jumped through all the hoops working with Acronis trying to resolved this issue and it's still pending with the Development Team...I gave up!

I ended up adding a IDE drive to my system and disconnected my SATA drive completely...I wasn't to happy but at least I could continue to use True Image and now I had reliable image backups and could boot from the CD in case my IDE drive completely failed.

Hang in there we're getting to the work around...I don't know why I thought of this but I decided to use Partition Magic and convert my SATA drive to FAT32 and reformat it, just because. So now I have a clean FAT32 SATA 160GB drive along with my IDE system drive.

At this point I decided to give the True Image Boot CD a try just to see if it would boot and low and behold it did; I could even see, when I selected the "Create Image" option , my SATA drive. Well, was I excited?...is this gonna work. Long story short it did.

I was able to create an image backup of my system Drive - C (NTFS) and store it on my SATA drive, which is now formatted as a FAT32 and guess what....the acid test....I was even able to restore my Drive C (NTFS)using that image I just created and stored on my SATA (FAT32)drive.

Now you see why I call this a "Work Around"...who uses FAT32 these days? It doesn't bother me but some of you folks won't have it. If I'm only storing my images on a FAT32 drive and my system is on a NTFS drive I'm good to go.

Maybe this information will help the Acronis development team to resolve this issue with an upgrade to True Image and maybe it will help this forum cool down a little...

Comments and Feedback - Appreciated,

Rod Moses
Acronis "long time" Customer

 

Oh well, bump it!

I'm out of here....

Rod

 

Hello Rod,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

We do greatly appreciate your help in the solution of the probelm. We will give this information to our Development Team and they will take it into account creating the new update.

Thank you.
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Ilya Toytman