Disk Director 2160 not able to see Dell E520 HDD

This is a bit of a strange one. I have made a recovery CD that contains both the latest True Image, and the latest Disk Director.

TI can see the HDD that is in the Dell E520 (brand new) so that I could make a backup image to an external USB HDD.

DD could not see the HDD at all. I tried with and without the USB HDD attached, but with no luck.

The Dell E520 uses a Serial ATA HDD, so I suspect the drivers needed for this are missing from DD. Lets hope next update sorts this one please

 

FWIW, I have a newly built computer (ASUS MB) and DD couldn't see the Serial ATA drive in it either.

bert

 

Have you tried the safe mode of DD? This sometimes works when the full mode won't because it uses the BIOS to access the drives instead of the linux drivers.

Yes, the linux drivers need to be updated in DD. It always seems to be a ways behind TI in hardware support.

 

Yes, tried safe mode and still not fire. Thanks for the idea though.

Always thought that the drivers used for DD would be the same as TI, oh well. You learn something new every day.

 

In Safe Mode, DD could see the Dell's SATA HDD, but could not see the USB HDD. 8-( Tech Support suggested the following. but it did not work for me:
- Boot the computer from Acronis True Image bootable rescue disc (Full version);
- Hit F11 key after the "Starting Acronis Loader..." message appears and you get to the selection screen of the program;
- After you get the "Linux Kernel Settings" prompt, please add "acpi=off noapic" parameter (without quotes) to the end of the Linux kernel command line (so it will be "quiet acpi=off noapic");
- Click OK button.

 

Same here, DD 2160 is not able to see my disks on my ASUS Aspire 9815, but there is no problem with the latest TI.


Now I have three partitions on the disk, first one 3.1 GB for swap, then a 20 GB for windows and finally a large partition for the user data. However the latest backup I have was from the time I only had two partitions, a 26 GB for windows and the a large partition for user data.

When I try to restore the backup to the existing 20 GB partition I cannot not boot. I assume I have to merge the 3.1 GB and 20 GB partitions and restore the backup to it but I cannot do that since DD doesn't work.

I am booting from a Acronis bootable CD and have tried safe mode of DD also.

 

flekstor,

Is this Windows XP?

What boot error are you getting after you restore to the 20GB partition?

What drive letter did XP have in the image you restored? C: ?

If the 20GB partition is marked active (during the restore), you probably just need to edit the boot.ini file to point to the correct partition.

If DD won't boot up for you, you could use a live Linux boot cd like Knoppix to do this.

Another option you could try (I don't know if this would work, I've never tried it): You could mount the image you want to restore (make a copy if you're afraid you'll mess it up). Mount the image as Read/Write mode. Browse the image and find the boot.ini file. Edit it to point to the correct partition and then save it and unmount the image. TI should create a incremental with the changes. Now restore that image and hopefully the edited boot.ini file will be restored and you'll be able to boot.

 

It's Vista but I run TI from a TI-CD I made using XP earlier.

I have tried a few more things. I repartioned my disk using Paragon Hard Disk manager and have now a 20 GB partition first on my disk. Then I restored my the C drive with windows to that partition. Didn't get any errors but when I try to boot it complained about missing NTLDR. I booted up using Paragon again and saw that the 20 GB partition is not formatted. I tried once more to format it as NTFS with paragon and then a new restore to it with the same result.

I also tried to just restore all the files with TI since it apparently messes up the partition when restoring the whole partition but it stopped at som 70% and I had to reboot the PC.

Earlier I booted up using an ubuntu 6.0 CD but it didn't recognized my disk. Have a striped raid volume created from 2*160 GB disks.


I don't know what to do now, I have an important TrueCrypt container on an other partition I don't want to loose, otherwise I could reinstall the PC from scratch. Perhaps I can do this anyway but I am not sure what my Acer recovery CD will do with my partitions if I use it.

I also don't know if I should restore the MBR from the backup or not, could something bad happens with the other volumes if I do?

 

TI deletes and recreates the partition as part of the restore process, so fomatting first makes no difference.

If you have a Vista DVD, after you restore the partition with TI, boot from the Vista DVD and run the Repair option. Any time the Vista partition is moved/changed it has to be repaired.

Does your Acer recovery cd/dvd have a Vista Repair option?

 

No unfortunately I don't have a Vista DVD and the Acer DVD can only re-install Vista, it doesn'r give me any options.

I decided to convert my data partition from primary to logical yesterday and then I am planning to re-install Vista with the Acer DVD. The reason for converting it is to avoid that Acer choses this partition as the Vista partition and scratch it.

I don't know if this helps though (perhaps Acer will choose the data partition anyway and format it) and it also surpriced me that it takes so long time to convert it (with Paragon), started it some 9 hours ago and it looks like it will take some 10-20 hours more and I cannot stop the process now (I will loose the data if I do).

 

On the new DELL PC's, when booting from Acronis CD, you must FIRST go into CMOS and change the SATA setting to "Legacy" instead of "Normal", then you will be able to see the SATA harddrive in the DELL.

don't forget to change it back for best SATA performance.

 

I created a BartPE CD with DD and I still couldn't see my disk with it. I then added these drivers to BartPE: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=19551&st=0&p=129837&#entry129837
and it worked. Now I can see my disk and rescue the files I have in my TrueCrypt container. DD is also working when run from the BartPE CD now.

Don't know yet if I will be able to restore my backup of my C disk but apparently DD doesn't add the necessarry drivers when building a resque CD.