USB or SATA not both

I posted this issue to the Acronis customer support a week ago and since there's been no response I wonder whether anyone in this forum may have come across and have the solution or know whether DDsuite10 can provide it.

I have used DD v.9.0 successfully since purchase with "ACPI=OFF NOAPIC"to copy the system partition of my primary drive using the rescue disc from internal PATA drive to external USB drive (Freecom disk) and to copy it back when I have had PC failures. (I take the Freecom disk to another physical location for safe keeping as a last resort backup.) The copy operation takes approximately 20 minutes in each direction ('C' drive size 25GB). The advantage, unlike a TI .tib image is that there is no NTLDR or other issues when copying the stored system partition back into the primary system partition, it's just a straight copy. I recently changed out both PATA drives for Samsung Spinpoint SATA II drives. DD9 sees both drives in Windows and the rescue disk sees them when using the 'safe mode' and can make changes to them and copy between them. However, while in 'safe mode' doing anything with the USB drive seems to fail. If I implement acpi=off noapic the screen scrolls until it reaches atap1 then repeats atap1 a number of times finally stating that atap1 has timed out after 30secs. it does this for the second drive also. When the scrolling reaches the end and I exit then only the USB drive is visible. Consequently the operation that worked very well with PATA drives now does not work at all. I don't understand why the "acpi...." command does not work with SATA drives. The drives are currently not in any raid array, since until I can get this problem solved I am just cloning my primary disc.
Mobo is an older Winfast with SATA and PATA support
Since I'm no expert any assistance would be appreciated.

 

crasion:

Welcome to the forum. I can suggest three things that you can try:

1. In your motherboard's BIOS, look for an "IDE Compatibility Mode" setting for your SATA disks. Try again with this setting. Perhaps DD 9 will then recognize the disks in emulation (compatibility) mode.
2. Log into your account on the Acronis web site and look at your registered products page. See if Acronis has posted an "Alternate ISO" file for DD 9. They have for DD 10, and the alternate ISO file has solved some problems with newer hardware for some users.
3. You could consider updating to DD 10, although the program's Linux driver database is about 2 years old now, so there is no guarantee that it would work properly with your hardware. But you could download the trial version, burn a recovery CD, and check to make sure that it sees all of your disks.

DD 10 and TI 2009 are currently on sale for 50% off. This is a sure sign that new versions of both programs are just around the corner.

 

Thanks Kolo, I did check my account before I posted and didn't see any further downloads available beyond the ones I've already loaded, but no harm checking again. In the BIOS I have IDE mode and UDMA enabled and in the NVIDIA serial controller in device manager I let the BIOS decide, it chooses serial ATA 1 - 1.5G, should I force it to PIO and try that?

Cheers

 

PIO mode does not sound correct for a SATA disk. The setting, if it exists at all, should be called something like "IDE Emulation" or "IDE Compatibility" mode. Basically, the disk is presented to the operating system as if it were on an IDE interface even thought it is connected to a SATA interface.

Another possibility is to see if your motherboard has a newer BIOS version available. This feature may have been added in an update (or maybe not).

 

Hi Kolo,
I didn't find anything in the BIOS labelled compatibility mode but two items "IDE DMA transfer access" and "IDE prefetch mode" have now been both enabled. I checked the BIOS site, there is a download but it cautions against using the download unless there are specific MOBO issues and since it's not clear yet and I don't want to brick my PC I'll hang back from messing with the BIOS.

I'll try again tomorrow as running out of time now.

I guess as a worst case I can re-connect the PATA drives on the IDE cable and clone or copy that way. Not ideal but a possible fix.

You'd think Acronis would have cracked this little problem, I could always try Synctoy, but not sure that it is a good solution to this issue.

Cheers for now

 

If the motherboard manufacturer posted a list of the changes then you could see if they fixed anything that is important to you. If not then don't bother with the upgrade.

If they addressed the problem it would be in the next update due out soon. The current version of DD10 is about 2 years old now so it's list of supported hardware in the boot environment is getting dated. DD9 is even older...

SyncToy is for copying files in Windows at the file level so it won't help with copying a partition.

 

I tried again with the BIOS items already mentioned enabled. Using safe mode in DD9 and implementing "acpi=off noapic" I got to see both sata drives and the USB drive. I enlarged a partion on the USB drive and that happened within a few minutes, so being optimistic I then attempted to copy the active C drive to an unformatted section of the usb drive. It appeared at first to work correctly, the led on the USB drive illuminated to show it was doing something. However the two thermometer bars at the bottom of the DD9 window showing task progress remained white for a full 20minutes. Then two green bars showed up in both windows simultaneously and the "7 hours" appeared in the extreme right corner. The 'C' partition is all of 30GB, so I dumped that idea, re-connected an unformatted pata disk to the IDE cable and copied the 'C' drive as an active partition in about five minutes including the re-boot.

I'll check the mobo site for the types of issues that the bios upgrade addresses, but that'll probably have to wait until the weekend now.

Acronis does not seem to have hacked the SATA/USB issue in DD9 so that is more than a little disappointing

Thanks for your help.