Bootable Rescue Media - on floppy discs

I decided that I would not change my BIOS settings, so created the set of 7 floppy discs containing the bootable TI8.

First attempt:
TI8 reported that the discs had been created successfully.
On rebooting with the first floppy in my PC, I got two messages:
"Starting Acronis Loader"
"Non-system disk, press any key . . ."

If I pressed any key, this just looped. So I abandoned it, removed the floppy and restarted as normal. I reloaded the disc and opened it in Explorer - or rather I tried to, Explorer just hung trying to read the floppy. Seemingly, the floppy was corrupt.

So, I would suggest to anyone-else relying on floppy discs, try them out before you need to use True Image "Rescue" for real. After you have created the TI Rescue software on them, Open each one in Explorer to ensure they can be read.

And reboot and load TI8 from them before you need to use it.

. . . . Which brings me to the next issue:

So I threw away the problematic floppy and created a new set of discs. I put the first one in the floppy drive and rebooted my PC. This time the discs were OK, I was able to load TI8 from the floppies, run it to get the Main Window, then selected Restore Image to make sure I could see and select the images (on my external disc) then I exited without doing anything.

One slightly worrying thing, while the software was being loaded from the floppies, I could hear periodic pairs of buzzing noises coming from the floppy disc drive, Several sectors (?) would be copied, with the expected floppy disc sounds, then a pair of these buzzes, several sectors and pair of buzzes again and so on until all the content was loaded. This happened on each floppy.

Does anyone have any idea what this is all about?

I am pretty confident that my floppy disc is OK (when I tried copying the files from the floppy discs to my C:\ drive there were no buzzes.

And finally, after TI8 had loaded, I saw a message "ohci1394_0 SelfID received outside of bus reset sequence" Can you tell me what this means?, is it of any concern? (my external disc is on a Firewire Interface, this is 1394, I believe)

TIA

 

Hello DarkStar,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

The message you get is the report of your Firewire floppy drive initializing in Acronis True Image Linux environment. You may disregard it since everything works normally. In fact, the message is just the statement that you have external Firewire disk and that it was initialized. There is nothing to worry about.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hello DarkStar,

I probably don't need to say this but make sure you use the Check Image Wizard to verify the image after it's created. Part way through a Restore is not the time to find out that the image is corrupt because, by then, TI will have deleted the original partitions/data on the destination drive.

Regards

 

Many thanks for the replies.

Any comments on the buzzing noises from my floppy drive when I am creating the bootable rescue media?

(I have checked the drive copying files from Windows Explorer and it does sounds fine there.)

 

Hello again DarkStar,

I've never had cause to create the bootable floppies. However, going by my CD/DVD recorder's activity light, it seems that TI creates the bootable rescue media in chunks rather than a continuous data stream. If this is the case then that would account for the cyclic activity of your floppy drive and I would say it's nothing to worry about.

Regards

 

Menorcaman, thanks for the info.

It certainly is a regular buzzing, so your analysis sounds good to me.