ATI 10 won't recognize second drive

ATI 10 won't recognize second drive - RESOLVED!

Well, here I am a year later, and decided to give this ornery software another try. Last time it crashed both mine and my wife's computers. This time, I am only trying it on mine, which I have installed two Seagate SATA drives of identical type. NO RAID this time! Just SATA (channel 0 and channel 1).

I have installed ATI 10, upgraded it to latest version, and formatted my second drive using Windows XP. Unfortunately ATI will not recognize the second drive. Both these drives are reported in BIOS, and can be seen by Windows XP. I can manage them via Windows Admin Tools, and have the second drive lettered "X" to keep it from being renamed if I change peripherals.

I have uninstalled/reinstalled ATI to no avail. Acronis just will not work for me. I am open to any ideas why this software will not work when all other software I have runs without error.

 

The only suggestion I have is to get the Trial of ver 11 and see if it does any better. Be sure to make the Rescue cd too and make sure it sees both your drives.

 

retread,

Out of interest, can you see both of your HDs when using the Acronis TI 10 boot CD?

 

Don't know... will try and report back.

 

Glad you brought up the issue, Brian. I put in the bootable CD, and it does see both drives, but has trouble reading one of the sectors on drive 2. I will re-format the drive and see if this will help. Thanks.

 

Interesting. I guess you need to do a chkdsk /r on that HD. Are you doing a Quick or Full Format?

 

Did a scandisk w/auto error fix and that didn't work. Did a quick format, and that didn't either. Will try a full format, and if it doesn't fix it, I will try the Seagate HDD fixer-upper.

 

That's not chkdsk /r

 

Yeah, but I was in a hurry.....

 

Update: re-formatted second drive (full format), but ATI still will not recognize it. I am suspicious that the MBR/MFT has been altered by the buggy previous copy.

These copies were purchased from Tiger Direct, and they have been good about their return policy. This is the third replacement, so I am not going to swap it again. If I can't get this thing to work, I will sell it or throw it away. I have never had so much trouble with a software product.

 

You say "this is the third replacement", which makes me wonder if there is a problem on your system rather than the software installation disk being defective.

If you recently purchased ATI, why did you purchase ATI 10 rather than the latest ATI 11? No matter where you buy ATI 11, you would be able to register at Acronis and download the latest build.

 

IMHO It doesn't matter.

First:
Start with the rescue-CD. At the menu press F11 and write this to the command line (without quotes):
"acpi=off noapic quiet" press ok-button and make your choice.

Does it start now?

BTW: The kernel of Ti10 has problems with SATA.

Second:
if you really use the program "scandisk.exe" the you use a program of Win98 with 16bit.
Because in 16bit you cannot address all the hdd space the program destroys the hdd structure dead sure

 

If you will note the first post in this thread, I mentioned that I had trouble with ATI for over a year. I bought this version before ATI 11 was available. I am now seeing that I bought a pig in a poke.

Nowhere did the publishers make it clear that ATI 10 did not work with RAID 10. I only found out after it crashed my system. After rebuilding my system, I decided against a RAID construct and bought SATA drives which I have backed up on my network with NAS. I have been leary of using Acronis ever since, and now find out with good reason.

 

I am not having trouble running the ATI program. It just does not see my second drive and therefore will not allow me to Clone or otherwise access it.

I am using Windows XP sp3, and use the built-in Admin Tools.

 

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\Ed>chkdsk X: /r
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is Clone.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

244198583 KB total disk space.
20 KB in 2 files.
4 KB in 9 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
73443 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
244125116 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
61049645 total allocation units on disk.
61031279 allocation units available on disk.

C:\Documents and Settings\Ed>

 

Your suggestion to download a free trial of ATI 11 is a good one. Unfortunately, Acronis seems to have shut off the access to it. Everything works on their site but the download function. I have disabled pop-up blockers and enabled my firewall.....

 

If this is the page you tried:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/
Instead of L-clicking on the down triangle, r-click on it and choose "Open In New Window".

 

Thanks! got it....

Removed ATI 10, installed ATI 11, (rebooted) but same-o, same-o. ATI will not recognize second SATA disk. I can't clone or add a new disk. It keeps saying I must have 2 disks to do the operation. Duh!

Maybe one of the geniuses at Acronis can tell me whether or not ATI will support HDDs on the serial channels.

If they only support IDE, they should say so.

 

When I get a drive messed up to the point that it refuses to be recognized by all normal methods, a wipe of the drive (at least the start) and MBR followed by a new initialization usually will allow it to be detected. I usually use DD for this, but there are other programs. Of course, you'll lose anything on the drive if you try this method.

 

The point is, that the second drive is recognized by all other normal methods. It is only ATI that will not recognize it.

Obviously it is recognized by the BIOS, as not only does it show on the secondary channel on boot up, but I can see it under My Computer, I can Manage it with Disk Manager, I can format it, resize it, scan it, whatever. ATI is the problem, not the existence of the second drive.

Ahhhh... just did a peek at it with Partition Magic. It reports a BAD MBR, and PM will not format it. Strange, that WinXP will format it and show no errors.

 

It's just a suggestion. I've had drives that show up fine in Windows, fine in Linux, but won't show up in TI/DD in Windows. Or, the drive may show up fine in Windows and Linux and not TI/DD in Linux. I don't know exactly what causes the drive to be recognized by some programs and operating systems and not others. Usually, it happens during or after a lot of testing or failed attempts at something.

Have you checked if you have the latest TI snapapi drivers installed?

 

I think I found the problem. When I peeked at it with Partition Magic and saw the BAD MBR, I went to Windows Disk Manager and deleted the partition and re-formatted.

I remember that last year when ATI crashed this system that it altered the MBR/MFT and left it unrecoverable. That's the reason I abandoned the RAID scheme.... once the MFT is changed to a proprietary value, there is no way to reconstruct it and the mirror is broken. Since I had to format the drives to re-install Windows, I decided RAID was not the fail-safe I thought it was, so changed to the dual channel SATA setup. I guess the second drive did not get re-partitioned since I did not use it or install an OS on it for the last 12 months. It is formatting as I speak, so I am gonna call it a nite and see how it looks in the a.m.

 

Re: ATI 10 won't recognize second drive - RESOLVED!

That was it! After deleting partitions and re-formatting the second drive, ATI now recognizes it and cloning is complete.

I strongly recommend that Acronis put a warning on ATI Home that RAID USERS SHOULD NOT USE ACRONIS SECURE ZONE. ACZ makes changes to the Master File Table, and may render the system unusable. Furthermore, even after recovery, the MFT can only be returned to the original state by a complete deletion of all partitions and re-formatting.