WOW: ATI Home 2009 ReqBlocks miscalculated

I am new to the forum, please forgive me & redirect this if necessary.

First install of Acronis True Image Home 2009 on an old laptop (no other Acronis porducts there).

When first starting, a pop up suggested one-click protection, which included setting up the Acronis Secure Zone. I misread the numbers (it looked like 30 Meg Bytes to me), and clicked to go ahead.

The system wanted to reboot to continue (I really needed an image on an external drive before any of this started) - and I did,

Operation 1 of 4 resizing partition is when I saw that it was resizing from 56 GB -> 26 GB - not a good thing. I did not panic, but let it continue.

Then got an operation error: Internal error: ReqBlocks miscalculated.

I was sweating, saw no way out, hit Esc key, it exited gracefully, and rebooted.

Yikes - I still had windows. I am very disturbed by all of this. There should have been A LOT more warning for a very dangerous operation w/ no backup, for someone who was functioning in tired mode.

Am I just too picky? Should I escalate this?

Thanks,

Jim A.

 

While you're still in the driving seat, make the bootable True Image Rescue cd from the installed software. Next stay away from the Secure Zone until you understand the software more fully. Above all do not activate the Startup Recovery Manager - again, until you use the software some more. You may find, like many of us here, that the SZ and SRM are not really necessary - you have an external drive to hold your Backup Images.

After making that Rescue CD, boot with it and check to see if a SZ was, in fact made. Use the Manage Secure Zone feature from the Rescue CD. If there is an SZ, you will see a link to remove it.

 

Play it safe; don't do anyting that requires a so-called secure zone or the dreaded Acronis Recovery Manager. If you need to recover someday, do it from a bootCD; at least if that doesn't work right on y our hardware, it's unlikely to botch you boot disk. The same cannot be said to the SZ and ARM

 

Thank you both, for your replies.

The thing is, it is not my first time around for this software, I have been using it for several years (maybe not regularly) - ATI workstation 9.1

And have it working in some places that maybe it shouldn't (WinXP embedded).

So what I am whining about is that this package led me down this rosy path just by hitting enter and accepting the defaults! I wasn't aware of the dread lurking, unfortunately. And I am concerned for other unsuspecting users.

I will look again for the uninstall of ASZ - it did complete, I can see it in MS disk manager, and I downloaded Acronis Disk Director trial, hoping to get the partition back, then found it I can look but no touch. sigh.

I most certainly don't want to back up much of anything onto the same physical hard drive - what is the point of that? I thought I was getting 30MB of registry & settings backup, which might not have been a bad idea.

I have built a Bootable Rescue CD, and have an image of the partition on an external HD now, but it won't do much good once I resize this thing.

Thanks for the shoulder.

Jim