Acronis doesn't like my 1TB MyBook

Hi all,

I have a 1 TB MyBook Essential (reformatted to NTFS) plugged through USB 2.0 to my computer (XP Pro, SP3, all updates installed). When I open True Image Home 11.0, it analyzes all attached partitions. Before plugging in the external MyBook, this was quite fast. Now it takes exactly 15 minutes just to analyze the MyBook (only taking mere seconds to analyze my C drive and an internal 320 GB drive). This is unacceptable, and seems to hint at some kind of incompatability. The light on the external MyBook will activate for a little while (scrolling up and down), and then it will stop moving for minutes at a time (meaning the drive is not being accessed). Many minutes later, it will do the same thing again. The magnifying lense on the icon next to the completion bar for Acronis seems to pause and move in relation to the light on the harddrive. The harddrive itself works great and I have moved files to and from it with absolutely no problems. The problem is only when dealing with Acronis.

I am also getting the hotplug.dll error, but I have read up on how to fix this. Could the issues be related? I haven't heard of anyone else having this analyzing partion problem, though.
I was wondering, do I have to have all my external hard drives plugged in to be able to fix their drivers in Device Manager?

I have my computer back up my C drive every three days. This happens when I am not around. I "Switch Users" to lock my PC. When the 1 TB hard drive is plugged in, the backup process causes my computer to freeze so that I cannot log back in. I'm not sure what it is, but Acronis does not like it when I have the drive plugged in. When it is not connected, Acronis runs the scheduled task fine.

Any ideas on what could be doing this? If updating Acronis will help, I would like to do that, but the site seems to be down right now. I haven't updated since I bought it, and I'm wondering if it is straight foward to update, or do I have to do something special (like uninstall the original, or shut down Acronis)?

Thank you in advance,

-mynameispants-

 

I use an updated (to the latest build) TI11 but I still had the same exact problem with WD MyBook 500GB drive. I tried all three, USB, eSATA, Firewire, connectors with the same problem, TI will hang up.
I took the drive out of the WD factory enclosure, attached it with a cheap simple USB adapter and it works fine.
There must be something in the WD power management electronics that does not work with Acronis.

 

Perhaps this link may help.

Western Digital My Book External Hard Drive & Acronis True Image
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=144460

 

The problem is not universal. I use a 500 MB Western Digital MyBook drive with Acronis 11, both via Windows and via the Rescue CD.

 

Maybe some users of MyBook inadvertently activate the MyBook backup software and it isn't playing nice with True Image?

 

Possibly. I don't use the WD tools, other than the WD drive icon.

 

wan2no,
I would really rather not remove the drive from its factory enclosure, as that would void the warranty.

Grover,
I read the link, but I am having no problems connecting (or disconnecting) the drive to my computer. Actually, the drive is not being used for ATI backups at all, which is why I am confused as to why this is happening.

tuttle,
I don't use any of the WD tools either. In fact, I recently disabled WD button manager in startup so that it doesn't run when I plug in the My Book. It doesn't seem to be helping.

Are there any other suggestions as to what could be causing the problem?

Does anyone have any advice on how best to update, if that actually is a good idea?

Also, to fix the hotplug.dll error, do I have to have all my external drives plugged in so that I can try to update them? Or is that not necessary?

Thanks,

-pants-

 

XP Service Pack 3 (and Vista SP1) introduced a problem that seems to affect some TI users, causing the "analyzing partitions" step to take a long time to complete. You could try disabling the "Distributed Link Tracking Client" service to see if that's the issue that is affecting you. See this thread for a discussion of the issue. Post #10 contains simple instructions for disabling the service on Vista machines. Since you're using XP, skip the first three steps and instead substitute the following step -- click on START, select "Run" and type "Services.msc" in the box.