Acronis Secure Zone taken 5 GB from c:

I'm just not understanding. What is the size of your hard disk? Is it 30 GB?

 

Yeah it is 30 GB,,,,,,

 

OK, so then what is the issue? Is it that your two partitions are different sizes now (C: is smaller and D: is larger)?

 

All i want to stress out is my original size for c: was 12 GB and now it has come down to 9 GB ,,,how hard is that to explain.....with all this images i just posted,,,

 

Page 22: (Getting to know Acronis True Image Home)User Guide:

I m seeing ur problem m8 ,,, i believe the frst time when u opened ATI then the Acronis One -Click Protection window poped up , like this.

Please read the (Acronis True Image Home 2009- User Guide)


If u observe the picture clearly, on the One click Protection screen shot, The option of backing up ur system volume and master Boot Record is placed in a destination known as asz:\System backup.tib
( asz is an acronym for Acronis Secure Zone , which is invisible.)

On the user guide it also states that : If a Computer has only one hard drive,and several partition , then the program will use a non-system partiton with max space.
I believe in ur case u assigned c: for The Secure Zone, so after applying this algorithm to ur computer ,ATI will offer the optimum place for storing ur backups.

Now this Secure Zone could be accessed from within the PC or with a Bootable Recovery Media. Or by activating the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager.

If the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager is activated then,it overwrites the Master Boot Record (MBR) with its own boot code. " Page 20 "Please see the User Guide ATi 2009 ".

I believe yes some space has been lost in the process n i also think u r in double trouble....lol

U also mentioned u had cancelled the One Click Protection from the Task Bar ,that was on progress,,,, for that i cant suggest u anything, u terminated before it was completed, now i feel after applying all these changes of assigning n creating the Secure Zone is lost somewhere within c:, so even after removing the Secure zone u dont see an increase in the size of ur c: One guy just said it above ,, all the combination to the safe is within the safe now.

All i can suggest u is try to use Recovery Console from ur Win xp CD to fix mbr or to updated or rebuild the boot.ini From the Recovery Console.
Try this link m8: hope it will be helpful

http://kb.acronis.com/content/1624

These are some steps provided by Acronis in case u happen to loose some space after removing Secure Zone.
(plz reply if u succeed)
Pleeeeeeeasee never use Secure Zone again......

 

I think that WiseOracle is on the right track. When you were setting up the Secure Zone you took 3 GB from the C: partition, shrinking it from 12 GB to 9 GB. When you remove the Secure Zone you are asked to select the partition to give the space to. Probably you accidentally gave the 3 GB to the D: partition instead of to the C: partition.

However, I would take issue with this:

Since your PC is booting properly there is nothing wrong with your MBR or your boot.ini file. "Fixing" these will not accomplish anything. Since you've stated that you started with and ended with a 30 GB hard disk, then there is nothing hidden or missing. As best I can tell, you've only managed to rearrange the sizes of your two partitions. If you want your C: partition to be 12 GB again you can do that with PartedMagic, however you will first need to remove some files from your D: partition so that you can shrink it by 3 GB and then you can expand C: by 3 GB.

 

__________________
wow ...Thank you Wise Oracle, for explaining so beautifully ,,,,that was exactly my problem ,i didn;t let the One click protection complete its process, i didn't knew this Protection resided within Acronis Secure Zone,,, u see honestly u r the first person who understood my problem...
i'll definitely try the method that is in the link u provided,,,,,,
Hope i'll be successful in removing this asz/ partition,,,,,

i think Acronis is better than any other Back-up system their is out their,,,,, but when these kind of things happen i h to think twice....before even approving or advicing some others to use this product,,,,,
i was almost beginning to think my problem is solved,,,,,

Will keep updating:

 

Any help here,,,
thank you people for being really generous for ur help...
I tried to follow many steps outined above ,,,fixed mbr, did a re-format , tried creating another Secure zone but nothing has helped so far...nothing has helped.

When ever i did a reformat n installed ATI n tried to create A Secure Zone for the first time , the one click protection didn't pop like it did.
So now i m thinking the Secure Zone which i inadvertently assigned it on c: n later didn't let the process of creating the Secure Zone complete, is lost somewhere in c:

So the last only option left for me was to do alow level format ,,got few freewares like Kill Disk , HDDLLF tool for win , MHDD ,,,,
HDDLLF tool for Windows showed 30 GIGs n did a LLF but on installing XP for Win Cd, it still showd 28 GIG,,,

I tried the Kill Disk freeversion, which was only able to write 0's. Which inadvertently made the HDD runtime slower .
So later i tried MHDD for DOS ,,,,this freeware was preety good , did LLF preety quickly n the HDD runtime was like before...but here it show 28 GIGS space. It removed the bad software blocks ....
Now i m trying my hand on Seatool will see if this helps......

I m sure it wont help,,,,just to save my self some time....i googled n found many Secure Zone problem, where the people were not able to retrieve their space,,,someone had mentioned doiing a LLF helped them to get the free space back ,,,so like wise i m doing that ,,,,

Can some suggest anyother way of getting back the space ,,,,,i would be really greatful....

 

If you've deleted all your partitions which is what a low level format will do then the SZ is no more.

A 30GB drive once formatted will not report itself as 30GB - your 28GB looks correct - my 75GB drive once formatted using NTFS is 69G25B.

Part is due to the formatting, and part is due to the fact that the manufacturers advertise their drives assuming 1000 = 1KB, the PC and all the formatting software ignores this marketing nonsense and reports your drive in decimalised binary which means 1KB = 1024 = 30GB = 29G30B with the losses incurred by formatting your 28GB is about right.

 

Hi their ,
i understand a 30 GB HDD would show something like 29 GB , mine was showing 28 GB.
Parts are due to formatting n parts for due to partitioning...
When i used Kill DIsk and MHDD it showed 28629 MB....
Then i used Seatool (this D.T. was for only Seagate n Maxtor) to LLF,i removed all the 0's and did a full erase.
So i began installing Win xp it showed 28629 MB n went ahead n did partition n assigned 12 GB for c: n 16 GB for d:
Later i did the Restore thru ATI Rescue Disc, however the backup i used was the one where the Secure Zone had failed to create to complete its process:

AS U CAN SEE HERE AFTER THE RESTORE THE 12 GB HAS GONE DOWN TO 11.7 GB....I DONT KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN THIS.

So after thinking over i realised this Acronis is not too safe for me,,,,imo
so i made-up my mind , i will not use ACRONIS again in near future.
What good is a Back-up system , which keeps zapping ur space little by little ,untill u begin to realized ohh where did my GB's go.
Hell their are a lot of Back-up system out their,,, so thank u Acronis for this Ordeal i went thru....i 'll never use this thing again if i get it for FREE with all the SERIAL intact....thanks for the trouble....

Any people reading this thread ,,,just think for a while about Acronis before backing ur Drive.
BYE --CHEO

( but thank u to all the people u tried to help me )

 

Please read post 34 again carefully. All throughout this exercise your hard disk has not changed in size one iota. You're getting confused by the different ways that Windows, True Image, and hard disk manufacturers specify the size of disks and partitions. True Image and Windows Disk Management display sizes in binary Gigabytes (GiB) and the hard disk manufacturers specify sizes in decimal bytes.

What has been happening to you is that the space on the disk gets shuffled around between the two partitions every time you perform an operation (creating a Secure Zone, restoring an image file, adjusting the size of the partitions with partitioning software, etc). The total amount of space on the disk never changes.

In your last example you had the 30 GB (decimal Gigabytes) or 27.9 GiB (binary Gigabytes) allocated the way you wanted -- 12 GiB for the C: partition and 16 GiB for the D: partition. You then restored an image but did you specify the size that you wanted for each partition when restoring? In looking at your figure the space on the C: partition did go down to 11.7 GiB but the space on the D: partition went up to 16.2 GiB. You can choose different sizes during the restore operation.

Add these two sizes together, remembering that Windows rounds off the displayed sizes of the partitions (in your picture it is displaying the sizes to three significant figures): 11.7 GiB + 16.2 GiB = 27.9 GiB. And 27.9 * 1024 *1024 *1024 = 30.0 GB (decimal), which is the size that your hard disk manufacturer specifies.

 

I do agree with u Kolo: D.M. displays in Binary n Disk Manufacturer in Decimal. Ur statement made me think once again , u see last time 3-4 days back my pc caught W32.Sality Virus n infected all my exe files,,,,
i didn't want the trouble to find the antivirus n remove everything ,,,since i had made my back-up prior to the day it got infected, so i had to start all over again.
However this time i did LLF n did the partiton, however like last time i made 12000 MB for C: n remaining for D: Now 12000 MB would be 12GB right .
So after everthing finished i just checked the total volume of C: n D:
It was the same:


So now i m taking this excuse as an oppurtunity to just say, may be what i said Acronis not being a good back-up system ,may not h been valid in many levels, so i apologize, to what ever comment i passed above.

So for time being i m using Paragon Drive Back-up 2009 n Acronis side by side...good combination.
Paragon is doin a decent work.

i just tried Norton n it came preety close to Acronis in terms of compressing the back-up. But lead ahead in Backing n Restoring work .

But i still h a deep hunch that may-be some space is still lost...
but i can live with some 1 or 2 GB being lost. Life wont cease to exit.
May be i'll try one more LLF with different Utility n see what i come up with.

 

Trying to resize a partition (160G) with SZ is absolutely insane. No matter what/how I tried to follow some obtuse instructions to resize my main partition to use the full disk (500G) FAILED MISERABLY.

I finally gave up after serious amounts of frustration and screwing up my HD more then once. I restored the clean backup and used GParted as indicated above. Worked simply and easily. Ran CHKDSK before booting WinXP/SP3 and all is well !!!

DO THAT and don't mess with SZ ANY MORE ! (hard won advice from the hard disk trenches a few days ago)

Mike

P.S. from the above messages - a 500G formatted shows up as 465G

 

500GB showed 465GB, which u r suggesting tht even u had a Secure Zone problem....May be u hvn't tried LLF on ur HDD, i m not suggesting u do so.

Maybe 500 GB would comedown to 154 if u h a large number of partition.

One last attemp to remove Secure Zone:

Some Maxtor LLF Utility MAXLLF n DBAN, if u r thinking of LLF ur HDD.
Then use Seatool again if ur HDD performance is down.

Just use Norton Ghost 14

 

A 500 GB disk should display as 465 GiB in Windows Disk Management. The central point of this long thread was to explain why this is so. This has nothing to do with the Acronis Secure Zone and has everything to do with the difference between bytes counted in decimal numbers (like we are used to in everyday life) and bytes counted in binary units like is commonly done in computers for simplicity of calculation.

The numbers displayed by Windows Explorer, Disk Management, and other utilities are in binary Gigabytes or GiB, where 1 GiB equals 1024 MiB, not 1000 MB. Said another way, 1024 bytes = 1 kiB, 1024 * 1024 bytes = 1 MiB, and 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes = 1 GiB.

Here is how Windows will display the size of a 500 GB disk. The disk manufacturer specifies the disk as containing 500,000,000,000 bytes. To get the size in GiB, divide by 1024 three times. So (500*10^9)/(1024*1024*1024) = 465.7 GiB.

Read this for a reference on binary GiB.

 

500G is the size of the raw hard drive.

The formatting process (NTFS/FAT/FAT32/HFS/etc.) puts the file system framework over the top of that. That creates the sectors/clusters (whatever term is used by the file system of choice), FAT's (File Allocation Tables), sector bitmaps, redundancies, checksums, etc. All that overhead takes up part of the raw 500G.

1K = 1024 in computer terms or

2^10 (2 to the 10th power) = 1024

A megabyte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte

1MB = 2 to the 20 power or 2^20 = (1024×1024) or 1048576 bytes

A gigabyte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

1GB = 2^30 (2 to the 30th power) or 1,073,741,824 bytes

I have no idea what you are suggesting. The 500G drive WILL show as 465G, that's the nature of hard drives. The formatted size is ALWAYS smaller then the stated raw size. I gave up on trying to use SZ to allocate the rest of the unused space to my main hd partition. Makes NO sense whatsoever. GParted worked simply and easily. No looking back.

Mike