Windows will not boot after True Image created partition

Tuttle,
Just wanted you to know that you are not alone. I had a similar situation happen to me.

I downloaded a trial version of True Image 8.0 Server with full functionality so I could test out if this is the right package for me. I wanted to test a image creation and restore before purchasing the software. The trial version recovery CD will not perform a restore, says it is a trial version. I guess they don't want a CD with full functionality which they have no way to expire in a trial scenario. The portion on disk is full functionality. I wish they would have told me that only the disk portion is full functionality and not the CD.

Anyway I have a new system, only thing on it is the OS, XP Pro MCE 2005. No PCI cards, pretty much a vanilla system. So I activated the startup recovery manager because that is where I could test a restore of the images I created. It told me I had to create a secure zone because one did not exist. I said ok to create a SZ on my internal RAID array, not my C drive. It created the SZ and the screen went black and rebooted. No success message or asking if I wanted to reboot, just zap.

Anyway, my c drive was marked as deleted in the process. My c drive is 10 gig on a physical 80 gig drive with no other partitions. My RAID array disk is still there but smaller by 10gig because of the creation of the SZ. I also have another internal 10gig disk which is still there. There is no bootable disk any longer so my system just tells me to insert bootable media into the floppy drive. I don't have a floppy, just a cd but I guess the Bios defaults to the floppy when it can't find a bootable drive.

Fortunately for me I copied image backups of the c drive to the raid array, the small 10 gig drive and an external USB drive. I did that because I did not know where I would be able to restore from when I tested that functionality.

I obtained a trial version of disk director. So booted with the CD and it finds my c drive marked as deleted. It is the correct size and correct amount of used space. That is where I am at. I sent an email to support yesterday and have yet to hear back. I assume that the course of action will be to restore the deleted partion and that should solve my problem. I shall wait and see. I like you will require a full version of Disk Director or some other recovery tool.

So like you TI deleted my c partition. Unlike you I was not creating the SZ on my C drive.

It is so ironic that I was testing disaster recovery software to save myself headache down the road when a disk failure happens or other failure. And the disaster recovery software caused a disaster.

 

You are not alone. There may be hundreds of other ATI victims.
Same happened to me.
Its not ironic-its paranoid.
I work in the IT Industry and I am carefull and conscient but I haven't had a diseaster experience like that before.

Even the safest things can go wrong some time: Not nice, but life (Murphy)
IT is sometimes "shaky": Not nice, but a fact
People make mistakes: Not nice, but we are all human.
People leave you stranded with a problem obviously they caused: Not nice, not professional, not business-style, not a serious partner to deal with.

I will give the guys another day to fix the problem and after that I will go public. Not to be understood as a revenge - rather as a common sense to prevent hundreds of others to get "trapped" (the nicest word I could find on the subject) or ruined the same way.
Thanks God I am an IT Pro so I have backups and its just a couple of hours 8and with that money) I loose and not my base of business.
I am scred others may be hurt worse.

Cheers

The one of hundreds of victims that stands up

 

Wow. I've been running AT for a while and have been very happy. So I suggested it to some colleges and one of the guys chose to install the "startup recovery manager". I've never trusted partition shape shifters after being bitten using other partition resizing tools.

Luckly, once acronis was installed, he created a backup image and was able to explore it. Because once he rebooted his laptop, he only gets a flashing cursor. Bios starts, but then dead. He doesn't even see an error saying invalid boot record.

He's calling me in a few hours so that I can walk him through a restore.

 

Amazing!

I've got the same problem as widower

I agree:
Its not a problem having a problem the problem is that obviously there is neither an answer nor a solution.

Depressing!

Even more depressing the answers of the "officials".
-none!-
Looks as if a customer were not worth to much here .
All I got from support within three days was an automatic answer on my third reminder on the third day- great!

Menorcaman, can you help, please?


Thanks


newbee
______________________

I ran into diseaster with confidence...






...and nobody cares

 

Hello Newbee of today,

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

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response. Could you please let me know your Acronis request # which was sent to you in autoreply? I will find out the reason for the delay.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Well I guess I was a lucky one. Over the phone, I walked my college through a few things and got him up and running.

Now for what I know:
He installed AT version build 8 and opted for a secure zone on an external usb drive and had a boot manager that asked to hit F11 upon power up.

If he didn't have his laptop in the docking station with the external usb drive, his machine wouldn't boot. It got past the bios and then just a blinking cursor.

Plug back into the docking station with usb drive, and he would see something about hit "F11", then his machine would boot.

So I walked him through re-writing his master boot record in winXP using the console as administrator.

After rebooting, now his machine works both in & out of the docking station. If he starts AT within windows, he is still able to see his previously archived drive on the "Acronis Secure Zone" external usb drive.

So I'm guessing that the boot manager that AT put on his machine was waiting to see the usb drive. Weird. Luckly, he didn't have deleted partitions as I've seen within this post.

 

Dear Ilya,

thanks for picking up.

The ticket # is Acronis #210618 and was issued by support@Acronis.com on Fri, 11 Mar 2005 13:29:45 +0300. The automatic answering performed in time however the hints there weren't too useful for the specific problem (try to run a diag program or run an update on a computer that doesn't boot!).
My request to support@Acronis.com was filed the same day at 11:35 so two hours thats fine.
What's not fine is that the initial support demand was sent out to support@acronis.de already at 11:47 on March 9 (followed by a reminder at 07:32 on March 10 unless I finally decided to "go direct".
Support instructions in Germnay advise you to use the local email support or call in a 0-900 line which had never been picked up (I guess if the Rosenheim Office still exists they were all on their way to Cebit-bad luck but how should I know? I guess in the ages of mobile radio, umts and ss7 call forwarding this is not a valid excuse, is it?

ANYHOW: Spending the whole day from noon browsing this great forum I finally managed to fix my "double trouble" myself.

The problem:

I installed ATI on my office PC running Win XP Home with SP2 with an external USB2 disk drive4 days ago. After having read and (thought) understood the manual and installation instructions I followed the proposed procedure creating a security zone (for redundancy reasons of course on the external USB disk). Then I did the capital mistake to start the SRM after successful backup and verification.
I shut down the PC and went home.
Next day - the PC does not boot. It finishes after the HW check right at the beginning of the boot process. Acronics boot disk works fine, restore of backup works fine, but the problem remains. The doc says: read faq and call or email the local office...
Two things went wrong.
1) My MBR got corrupted. (most probably by the srm).
finding a PC where I could download the file and burn the .iso image took some time and did not solve the problem. Still not booting.
2) After reading a couple of hundred postings I ended up with Menorcamans hint that the security zone might be the problem in case the USB backup device were switched off or hanging with the SRM just hangig while not finding the secure zone. Oh yes, backup devices are usually switched off while not running a backup
(Literally: You would not expect a car with gas in the tank not running because you removed the empty spare tank out of the trunk, would you?)
3) Switching on the USB disk and reboot the system after some "setup" time worked.
4) I removed the secure zone from within windows, shut down the backup device and did a reboot after that which worked out fine.
5 ) I booted from the Acronis CD and tried to back up the system to a file on the external drive: Linux hangs up while trying to create a subdirectory on the external disk.
6) reboot to windows, create a subdirectory "Images" on the backup partition of the external disk.
7) I booted from the Acronis CD and tried to back up the system to a file on the external drive: Linux hangs up while trying to create the file on the newly created subdirectory on the external disk.
I booted again from the Acronis CD and tried to back up the system to a file on the top level of the external drive: Finally it works.

Pooooh! I am with my Computer again at a point where I was 4 days ago.


Conclusion:
Never use secure zone for security image backup, in particular not when backing up to a second disc. (It may be a nice feature for "resetting" training systems with large discs). Secure zone may become interesting again once it supports simple direct backups to DVD.
SRM: You should disable that piece of crab unless it 1) works properly and does not kill MBRs 2) has an "off" switch and 3)does not require a secure zone (at least not on the same disk)
Your FAQ's and installlation hints are useless unless you enter the information you have put here in the forum in the sticky file.
This file ("Please read before you post") should be definitely a "read me first" on the online and printed documentation.

BTW: It is amazing how many postings in this forum are about the same subjects (Bugs, resp. "features")
If you had a clear strategy and a clear structure in your FAQs, 90% of this postings were obsolete.
Apart from the self-created sma..-.ss problems with tuned PCs and exotic hardware the average "plain-vanilla-flavour" user would be happy with simple cook recipes, i.e. standard scenarios with easy to follow instruction.
Even uncle Bill's software nowadays has a "dummy" and an "expert" mode.
Good backup software has only two buttons: IN and OUT with the respective options "where from" and "where to"

Just my opininon.

As long as disaster prevention is that difficult and error prone it will never be a mega-seller.

Back to the a.m. paranoia:
The disaster prevention software caused a disaster which I would not have had without it.



It would have been nice to have one unique tool for system and data backup.
For the time being and for the tools being I will stay with Uncle Bill's software for data backup and will use ATI only after major software installations, i.e. once a year if at all.

Cheers anyhow. Have a nice weekend

Newbee

 

Sorry, what I suggested works just as well with Win98SE and FAT32. However, you would have to obtain partitioning software.

If it won't take too long to reinstall everything, that may be the shortest path to a good system.

That's exactly right.

Unfortunately not. You boot from the Recovery CD and then when you are ready to restore, you switch to the disk(s) containing the image.

 

I haven't seen any statement in the True Image manual that a Secure Zone should never be created on an external drive. However, it's clear from your post and others that this creates horrible boot problems when the external drive is not available.

I think there should be a strongly worded, bold faced, large warning paragraph that
Create a Secure Zone only on the boot drive!
Do not create a Secure Zone on any other drive such as an external USB or Firewire drive!.

 

Hello all,

When you create Acronis Secure Zone and activate Acronis Startup Recovery Manager on the external (USB or FireWire) drive you should see the warning message that what you want to do is not recommended because in case you wish to boot the computer with the external drive turned off the computer will not boot. The reason is that activating Acronis Startup Recovery Manager will change MBR and that will cause computer not to boot if the external drive is unplugged.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hi John,

The problem isn't the SZ, it's the Startup Recovery Manager. As I've stated in previous threads, you can create a SZ on an external drive if you wish; just don't activate the SRM!!

Regards
Tom

 

Hi Tom,
Got it. I focused on the SZ when it's the SRM that creates the problem. I liked Ilya's reply that you will be warned if you do this, but perhaps that's not a strong enough warning.

Thanks

 

I have been looking through these forums for some time in regards to this very issue. At no time, either in the manual (which I do read) or during Secure Zone creation was I warned about this issue.

There is, obviously, a fix available that allows continued use of the Zone WITHOUT the use of the Recovery Manager. A shame this is not publicly available. A switch to DE-activate the Recovery Manager while retaining the SZ is much needed.

While I still believe TI is a great backup program, there are some glaring problems in this area. The only reason I used SZ in the first place was the auto management of generational backups. What I would have preferred to do is create three seperate backup scripts (ie, grandfather, father and son) that can run every three weeks and automatically overwrite themselves. Since ATI currently does not allow this, I used SZ on my external USB drive. Removed the system from the docking station and no boot. Disappointing to end up in this situation, and disappointing that working around it requires geek level disk administration.

So fixing the warnings at the very least is important, but fixing the silly problem in the first place even better!

Mark

 

Hello Markovich,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please let us know what build you use? If you activate Acronis Startup Recovery Manager on the external USB (or FireWire) drive you should get the following error (please see the screenshot). There should be no problems with just having Acronis Secure Zone on the external drive.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman