Acronis True Image Home v 10 - Restore failures

Hi
I am having a nightmare. I have a three disk system running Windows Xp Pro SP3 and True Image Home v 10. The boot drive contains the Acronis Secure Zone and a partition containing the operating system and the program file installations mainly. I have used Secure Zone to back up before but I was not very confident about it and so have been making my backups on a separate drive.

Ok I have been having a few problems with windows starting up, get to the desktop system hangs, get to the desktop and work for and hour then boot IE7 and system hangs etc. You get the picture.

OK I figure I will go back and restore a week back. I decide to clone the hard drive first in case of problems (good idea that turned out to be). I use the CD to boot - sometimes it gets into the program sometimes gives me some errors when Acronis console is loading - various disk related. Checked the new disk and replaced with another one - same issues. Anyway that is a minor annoyance.

Clone successful after 3 attempts (and several wasted hours)
Restore from backup drive - I see the various (incremental backups) all with the description of the last one made - that sucks - anyway I pick date 1. Restore seems to work then screen disappeared and system rebooted. MBR error.
I go back again try to restore files - 7 hours later it still has 7 hours to run - I stop it.

Go back to restore again - pick a different date - restore starts reports success but drive reports MBR error. I try again this time drive will not boot and drive is not recognised in the True Image console - a bit of digging finds it as an unformatted drive - set up again as new drive and try again after again checking disk thoroughly with manufacturers diagnostic. I mean this is supposed to be EASY right!! I try selecting whole drive & partitions, MBR only - every combination. I cannot get one to work. I check the validity of the backup - it passes no problem. I am now trying to restore the MBR from Disk Director - it has found the deleted partition )from the Restore function I guess since it was restoring the whole drive. It is 2 hours into searching for lost partitions. I also tried restoring the drive to the state it was in as of last backup which was made just before starting the restore procedure described here - that is achieved with no problem, boots into windows and I have the same issues I had with intermittent XP logging in failures and hang ups - I need to go back not be here again of course. How the hell do I get this to work, get into windows so I can get rid of the stupid secure zone and get back to work!

This software is marketed as easy. The documentation is complicated and not easy to understand. It is bought to save time and money but what use if it is so a) hard to set up properly, badly documented and doesn;t work properly.

It is an x64 Athlon based machine. I have tested memory with memtest no problem and have plenty of memory. I don't know what to do next if the restore will not work and I am very annoyed at two days of lost production and software that does not so what it is described to do. In this day and age one would expect the programmers to have managed to create a console where the mouse actually works too - yes I have seen the post about altering the start parameters but if that is so hard to code I am now wondering about the wisdom of having spent my money on this.

If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them and if I am misled in my anger towards the product because of my own stupidity then I will gladly post a retracement.

It would be really handy if the owners paid someone to do some decent easy to understand documentation of how to set up the processes, best practices and so on in language that the average person buying a 'One Click' solution might understand!!
Ian

 

The correct way to remove a secure zone is to open true image and use the manage secure zone wizard.
During this process you will be asked where to allocate the new free space.

Do that as a first step. Removing the secure zone will restore the MBR to its original form if you had activated the Start up Recovery Manager.

Xpilot

 

Hello slipperx,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

In order to solve MBR issue you can do the following:

Download special Acronis utility from this link . Use it to create a floppy and boot the machine from the floppy.

If you prefer to a fix MBR using a CD, then please download special Acronis utility from here. Use it to create a CD and boot the machine from the CD.

You can also restore MBR from full backup image.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev