TI 9 (build 3677) Secure Zone disappeared!

I have noticed that my Secure Zone, which is located on an entire 300gb drive (internal), has disappeared completely! The reason I say that is the secure zone no longer shows up as an archive location, either for restores or backups. This is true under Windows, Startup Recovery Manager, and Bootable Media Disk. In addition, the second 'page' of the 'Manage Acronis Secure Zone Wizard' asks which disk to create the secure zone on. When the SZ was active, the second page told how much space was available in the zone and the total size of the zone.

You should also know that the disk the SZ was on is still 'seen' by TI, just not as a SZ. Also, one other thing that points to the 'disappearance' of the Zone is the backup logs. Everything worked perfectly up to this past Friday morning. I schedule the backup of my system disk at 3am and the backup of my data disk at 4am every day. The 3am backup worked perfectly according to the log. The 4am backup had a message 'Failed to open Acronis Secure Zone for exclusive access.'. Since that time, every backup has failed with the exact same message. This would indicate to me that whatever happened, happened between 3 and 4am on Friday morning.

Something that might or might not be relevant is that the SZ was close to being full for the first time. There were many, many Full and Incremental backups within it for both my system disk and my data disk and I had used it several times for restores to my system disk. The archive went back to about Oct 6th of this year. I suspect that the archive got full, had a problem with that and somehow got corrupted (or something) and 'disappeared', for lack of better terminology. This doesn't make any sense to me without it being a corruption issue or something like corruption, because the way I understand it is that the SZ should have looked for the oldest full backup(s) and deleted it and the associated incrementals until there was room for the new backup.

What I want to know before going forward are two things:
1) Is there any chance of recovering the SZ and how might I go about doing it?
2) Has anyone seen this situation and/or know what might have caused it?

I have more that I want to ask, but I'll leave it at those two questions for now. Any further information you want to share, I will leave it to you to decide.

Thanks!

P.S. - FYI, I tried very hard to scour the boards to find anyone with an issue like this before posting and came up empty. Perhaps that is mainly a testament to my ability to search effectively, but I did spend considerable effort prior to posting.

 

Are you saying that your entire 300Gb drive IS a Secure Zone? You're right, I've been reading this forum for quite a while and I've never seen anyone mention the SZ disappearing.

 

Yes. As much of the 300gb disk that TI will allocate was allocated as a Secure Zone. There was a very small amount left over (less than 30meg) that was allocated as a separate partition (that I've never used, btw).

 

Does the missing drive show up in Windows, Admin tools, Disk management ?
If it is not there I suggest you first check the physical connections to the drive. Connectors/leads can fail.

Does the situation change if you reboot the computer?

When you reboot note if the 300 gb drive shows up in the POST checks.

A perusal of the Winows events logs may give a clue as to what has happened.


Xpilot

 

Thanks for your assistance! Find the answers to the questions you posed below.

1) The drive shows up fine under Windows, it just doesn't show up as a Secure Zone under Acronis.

2) The situation does not change if I reboot.

3) The drive shows up under POST checks.

4) The Windows event logs have no useful information about this situation.

Thanks again!

 

The 300gb drive should not appear in Windows Explorer as it has no drive letter as part of its stealth mode.
It should show under Windows disk management as a basic disk, online, Acronis SZ,FAT 32, healthy, unknown partition.

If Windows disk management recognises it as a secure zone and Acronis does not it is indeed a very odd situation.

In your original post you stated that the secure zone did not show up under Windows. You now say the drive shows up under Windows so how is it designated and where exactly does it appear?

Xpilot

 

I am sorry. I'm oncall for work and was mostly asleep when I composed the previous post. Thank you for staying with me. I'll try to do better going forward.

You are correct. Disk management recognises the Secure Zone partition as 'ACRONIS SZ', 298.07 GB, Healthy, Unknown Partition, no drive letter associated. It says capacity is 297.99 GB, Free space 2.22 GB. % Free = 0%, Fault Tolerance=no, Overhead = 0%.

There is also a 16 MB partition on the same disk (the leftover part that could not be included into the SZ. It DOES have a drive letter and is NTFS and healthy.

The Secure Zone DOES NOT show up under Windows Explorer.

I suppose this means that the SZ is still there, but for some reason Acronis is not recognising it? I guess the trick will be figuring a way to get TI to 'see' it again. Any further help you or anyone can be will be appreciated.

Xpilot, thank you very much for your assistance.

 

Hello bonsai63,

If not already done, try uninstalling TI via Windows Control Panel's Add or Remove Programs followed by a reinstall (before unistalling, use Windows Task Manager to end these running processes - schedul2.exe, schedhlp.exe, TimounterMonitor.exe and TrueImageMonitor.exe). Uninstalling TI will not destroy your AWOL Secure Zone.

Regards

 

A wild idea has popped into my mind. Perhaps you started off with a demo version of TI V9 and even though you may have subsequently installed a paid for version it thinks it is now time expired.
Not very likely but possible if you did not first uninstall the trial version.

If you open TI and start Recovery can you see the secure zone in the Restore Data Wizard? It should show up just below the desktop icon.
If it does show up there take the wizard a bit further until you can see the yellow bar above the secure drive details.
There should be no other icon in the bars such as a red circle or white cross.

Xpilot

 

Does TI find the SZ if booting from the rescue CD?

Colin

 

Hi Colin,

I believe the answer to that is "No". From bonsai63's 1st Post (my hilight):

Regards

 

Sorry for the long silence. I want to get this fixed, but in the meantime I backed up my System disk to my Data disk and vice verse, so I have some time now to decide the very best way to go. I'd rather not make a misstep that would cost me the SZ unless completely necessary. Thanks for all the help so far everyone.

Menorcaman, if I do as you have suggested and uninstall TI and then re-install, is it likely that somehow my SZ might then show up on it's own or do you have an idea of how that might play into getting my SZ to show up again? Was it just a suggestion on the assumption that it wouldn't hurt and what do I have to lose? It may be that I really don't have anything to lose, but I'd still like to try getting my SZ back if possible.

Next question (for anyone) ... if I uninstall and reinstall TI, is there a way to capture and import my old scheduled tasks to the new installation. I'd rather not have to recreate them. It's a small thing, I guess, but if anyone has suggestions I'm happy to hear them.

Xpilot, I did not start off with a demo version. I did a lot of research before choosing a product and TI sounded like it was what I needed for my situation. After deciding, I bought the downloadable version from newegg for $29.99. I never downloaded the newegg version and instead went directly to Acronis with my license key and downloaded build 3677 and installed that. It will be no problem at all to reinstall as I have kept all of my downloaded software in a particular directory structure on my Data drive.

Lastly, as I stated in my first massive post I cannot 'see' the SZ in either the restore wizard or the backup wizard. Nor can I see it via the bootable media version or the Startup Recovery Manager.

The next step, if I am unable to recover my SZ, 'might' involve me 'upgrading' to TI10 in order to check out the backup locations thingie, but SZ works fine for my purposes if I can only get it back. If I have to start back from scatch anyway, I might just as well go ahead and try a different approach altogether, eh?

Again, thanks so much for your help!

 

I don't think uninstalling TI removes your schedules.

However to play safe, why not copy them to another folder, if they are deleted, you'll at least be able to restore them.

They live at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Acronis\TrueImage\Scripts.

Colin

 

Thanks, Colin!

 

Done. No change. Any suggestions? Thanks again!

 

Any thoughts? Menorcaman? Anyone?

Thanks in advance.

 

Open TI and select Recovery. On the second screen of the Recovery data Wizard what are the first three items?

Xpilot

 

Hmm. Really most strange. If you go into Manage Acronis Secure Zone Wizard do you get the option to "Remove Acronis Secure Zone"?

Regards

 

and, just to shorten the conversation a little, here's a screenshot of the disk management screen. You see at the top my SZ, called 'ACRONIS SZ' (no drive letter associated), and then under that you see the 'leftover' partition, which I called (confusingly) 'Acronis True Image Secure Zone'. It has a drive letter (E associated with it and is 16mb.

Doh, it won't let me upload the second image. I'll post this and then post again with the secong image. ...

Thanks again everyone. I appreciate your input and assistance.

 

Here is the screenshot of the Windows XP Disk Management screen:


Thanks!

 

Hello again bonsai63,

You didn't answer my question regarding availability of the Remove Acronis Secure Zone option. However, let's assume the answer is "No", in which case I would try a complete manual uninstall of TI 9.0 as per these <Acronis Support instructions>, followed by a reinstall. Unfortunately this does entail losing your existing Schedule scripts.

Regards

 

Menorcaman,

I apologize. I thought the screenshot I posted answered your question. I went a little farther in the wizard this time and it only asks me where I want to create the SZ. When I select the disk where it resides, the ACRONIS SZ FAT32 partition does show up (greyed out so it cannot be selected), but it does not give the option to remove the SZ as far as I can tell.

I will take a look at your link and report back. Thanks, and if the screenshot below or the info above jogs anything, please let me know.

 

Oh, and since I copied the scheduled tasks to another folder, couldn't I just copy them back after the reinstall or is that not recommended?

 

Something in the installation of your TI is badly screwed up. Whilst it shows the existence of a Secure Zone (SZ), it's not registering that it's there . Normally, if TI detects and recognises the presence of a SZ, the Manage Acronis Secure Zone Wizard only gives you the option to either remove it or increase/decrease its size.

If a full manual uninstall/reinstall doesn't fix the problem then you need to advise whether you are prepared to delete the SZ and any images contained within it.

Regards