Error removing USB devices after cloning

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by madmike73, May 29, 2007.

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  1. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    I did the generic drive update technique and it worked for me even though the same 4 driver files were listed before and after the update and reboot. This suggests that possible one of the drivers was corrupted or, what I think is more likely, that when one of them was installed, the registry entries weren't quite kosher and it's ultimately a simple registry fix to prevent/fix this problem some of use have been having with usb removal.
     
  2. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    How did you hit upon this fix? It's one of those elegant fixes that seem obvious after you hear them, but which escaped everyone until one person saw it.

    sh

     
  3. controler

    controler Guest

    shieber

    I was looking at the date on the VolSnap.sys driver version and date and this was the only sys file with an older date and version. I should have taken a before snapshot of the sys file to post but would have to reinstall windows again
    to see if this is what happens.
    My machine is a Dell Dimension 4600 which comes with a ell install CD and not a MS OS install CD. I would be curious if all of us have a Dell, that had this problem.
    My HP laptop had the correct VolSnap.sys file.
    I might reinstall Windows again just and monitor the sys driver update. I know this problem doesn't exist untill installing ATI 11 and creating a secure zone.
    Wondering if ATI replaces the VolSnap.sys file on install? I will find out when I reinstall Windows again. I am the curious oneLOL

    I have not figured out the problem I get if I put the USB stick in, reboot with it in and do a system cleaning. It will BSOD every time.
    I would think those of you that have the USB removal issuse will also have the
    system clean BSOD.
    Nobody else has reported it as of yet.
     
  4. Michael2k7

    Michael2k7 Registered Member

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    I had posted a bug report here as well:

    https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=192228

    Note that I am using the Bootable meadia (CDs) to make my backups.

    This proves that it is purely an Acronis issue in how they image or restore.

    As it stands right now, True Image 11 CANNOT be reliably used to maintain integrity of system images.

    There is a serious issue here. For all we know there may be other symptoms we don't know about. The USB issue could very well be just one of them.
     
  5. controler

    controler Guest

    Machael

    When you do a recovery from your CD backups, can you do the driver update
    right after to get things working again?

    This should be an easy fix for Acronis. If nothing else they should be able to look at the driver version on install and update it if not current.

    After looking at my Windbg dunp of my crashes during my system clean, snapman.sys appears to be the culprit. I think support is saying it isn't.

    controler
     
  6. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    Well, I'd put this in the category of annoyance rather than serious or critical problem. First, you can safely remove hardware, you jsut get the error message, but he device is still handled properly from all I can tell.

    Second, relatively easy fix, attempt to update generic drives -- doesn't seem to matter if any of the generic drives actually update or are left as "can't find newer", going through the steps fixes the prob.

    It'd be nicer if it didn't happen at all, but it doesn't violate the integrity of images being stored or restored in any critical way -- this bug is just a "skeeter".

    Btw, re an earlier post, this happens on machines other than Dell and even when Secure zones haven't been created. I thin on some machines, doing a restore with the ATI 11 boot CD is enough to cause the problem.

     
  7. controler

    controler Guest

    Yes the USB removal thing was not that big of deal but the system crashes
    while doing a system clean up ARE.

    We all know WIndows XP doesn't crash on it's own. It is always a poorly written driver that crashes XP .

    I still think snapman is causing my problem.

    I just reformated my Dell and reinstalled windows with ALL updates and see VolSnap.SYS never gets updated on my machine untill I do the generic driver update in device manager. I will post a before & after screenshot later on the driver but first I want to do some more looking around :)
     
  8. geoffwm

    geoffwm Registered Member

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    My test involved a clean install of Windows XP Pro, absolutely NO additional software installed including ATI.

    I then made an image using the ATI 11.0_8058 recovery disc.

    After restoring this image the USB removal problem was evident.

    I then uninstalled all items under “storage volumes”

    After two reboots problem was resolved.

    The only driver listed for the Generic volumes was VolSnap.sys; I will not try this on my machine with ATI installed until more info is to hand.

    I cannot understand why Acronis cannot duplicate this error, may be they are waiting for some final answers form this great forum!
     
  9. scottvf

    scottvf Registered Member

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    Here's how to fix problem without doing windows repair.

    1. Go to windows Device Manager
    2. Click "view" and select "show hidden devices"
    3. Scroll down to "storage volumes"
    4. Click on the plus to expand.
    5. Click on each one listed and right click and uninstall. (you will get a message on some staying to reboot before it takes effect. Select no until you do them all.)
    6. Reboot.
    7. Wait till windows automatically reinstalls devices. Will prompt to reboot again.
    8 Reboot.
    Now it should work.

    The problem was they got corrupted.
     
  10. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    For me, I didn't even have to uninstall, jsut had to select update, even though a newer update was not found, the problem went away when I did this for each of the Generic Drives.
     
  11. Bruce Mahnke

    Bruce Mahnke Registered Member

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    Interesting results, I’ve enjoyed reading the many postings. Checking Device Manager with Show Hidden files I find many entries that I don’t recognize. I’ve added an Environment Variable in System Properties to show non present devices. Show Hidden Files now brings up quite a long list, many of which are grayed out. Will need to study this some more and will need to have a current image before blowing them away.

    Once again I thank you all for your input.

    Bruce
     
  12. raltiff

    raltiff Registered Member

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    Hi, I got the same problem in my PC after installed Seagate Disc Wizard. Actually I installed the SDW program to activate my 160G HDD in my WinXP, as you know Windows OS can't detect the large capacity HDD sometime which connect the motherboard IDE slot directly.

    In my case, When finished created the drive in 160G HDD. The "safely remove hardware" error went away. The Hot Plug error started when double clicking on the Safely Remove Icon down by the clock in Windows XP. It strange for me why got that error becoz seem my WinXP running as smooth as before.

    Now the problem was fixed after using marky solution. I agree with Bruce that It was really a interesting results. In the future we must facing another problem and problem again. The bugs are never end :)

    Thanks
     
  13. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    i might have been in error when I said it didn't matter if any of the Generic drives actually updated. I've done repeated restores with ATI 11 and in every case what has happened is one of the generic drives ends up with oddball Asci characters appended to its name. This entry does update and I suspect that corrects the prob.

    Why would ATI restore affect the name for a Generic Drive under Hidden Devices?
     
  14. controler

    controler Guest

    What I am seeing is the date file version of VolSnap doesn't change after the driver update either. After fresh windows install my system works ok until I create a secure zone at which time as you mentioned a volume with weird characters is created. I end up with two generic volumes. the top one looks normal but second one has the odd characters. In my case updating the first volume clears up the problem but if I update the second one, the weird characters are gone.
     
  15. controler

    controler Guest

    I was able to track changes during driver update but not after reboot with my program. Included is a text file for your pleasure.
     

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  16. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    On mine, the one with weird characters is the only one that updates. The rest all get the results that a newer driver could not be found.

     
  17. CliffMayo

    CliffMayo Registered Member

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    Many thanks to all in this thread.

    I cloned my c: hard drive onto a new (larger) hard drive, then removed the original hard drive and booted onto the cloned copy. It was then that I found the error.

    I reinstalled the original hard drive [ c:\ ] while keeping the second one installed [ e:\ ] and the problem was still there. I had successfully used the Safely Remove (by right clicking) before I installed ATI 11 Home (from a purchased CD, not the current build). So it looks like the error occurs when running the install program.

    Using the left click allowed me to remove flash drives, external hard drives (thanks again for that info).

    I then updated my drivers (one of the three images actually updated) without uninstalling and the problem went away.

    And yes, I do have a DELL desktop, no I did not put the Secure Zone on. I did put my entire drive onto a partition on the second drive and then moved all my unnecessary files to a second partition on the cloned drive to trim down the size of my images (hopefully will reduce the time required to backup/restore).

    I did report my problem to Acronis (non)support and received the "it is a Microsoft problem" and then I found this forum which had a real (and simple) fix. Perhaps Acronis (non)support should read this forum occasionally.
    Great work folks.
     
  18. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    I don't know about that it's possible to install and not have the problem, but restore the drive with ATI 11 and then it immediately shows up.

    Your case seems consistent in that it happens when a drive built by ATI is on the system -- in your case the clone drive.

    sh
     
  19. Michael2k7

    Michael2k7 Registered Member

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    I consider my data integrity critical because having corrupt images/data costs significant time and money. There may be other corrupt files in your restored image that you do not know about.

    I have stopped using TI 11.0 simply because Acronis cannot be trusted to keep my system images intact and I would not recommend anyone use it until they fix their issues. The sad part about this is, this problem had first surfaced around June 2007 timeframe and here we are in December with no bug fix.

    I am finding Acronis' practices in releasing _commerical_ software highly disturbing as their is an element of just creating a release and 'throwing it over the wall' without fully testing things. I'm all for being proactive but the number of things that get put out to customers is just rediculous. In this instance it indicates that they have no concept of how to test their backup integrity. The crashing when exiting from the boot CD is another issue easily tested for, but they never found it.

    Disk director 10.0 is another product that has serious issues. It claims to be Vista compatible but has been know to corrupt Vista partitons after resizing. To this day it still cannot detect my Vista partition and I have the most basic 1 drive/2 partition configuration.

    This just takes the cake though. If I could get a refund for the Disk Director/TI bundle I purchased, I'd do in a heartbeat. For now I'm sticking with Ghost 10.
     
  20. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    The Safely Remove Hardware problem doens't appear to have any critical aspects -- it doesn't appear to prevent any operations from performing or cause any data corruption. For that reason I would put it in the noncritical category. Whether it is an acceptable problem is personal matter. If I rejected outright any software that had bugs, I wouldn't be able to run much expect maybe some early version of Wordperfect ;-) Some folks are more and some less tolerant of software faults.

    I suspect Acronis is just not big enough to supoort more beta testing or to find fixes any faster. Which makes one wish Acronis would get off this one-year cylce for new-version releases -- that's obviously too fast to produce a reasonably reliable product. Either that, or they've lost their best programmers. Perhaps Acronis cannot stand the strain on its revenue stream of waiting longer between releases. But if it releases more stuff in the condition of ATI 11, I doubt it will make a diff. How long can a small software company remain once it begins to acquire the reputation that ATI 11 is bringing Acronis?
     
  21. plam

    plam Registered Member

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    Thanks to everyone for the clues in dealing with the hotplug.dll problem. I found it to be entirely due to activating Acronis Secure Zone with the generation of 2 renamed Generic Volumes one with an extra M at the end and the other with three extra characters represented by boxes. Deactivation of ASZ and removing the renamed volumes got rid of the hotplug problem. However, I have had more problems with Acronis TI 11 in terms of BSODs (at least one) and Disk Images that were reported to be completed successfully but were unable to be restored because of errors and this despite my default setting to Validate the image after backup. So I'm going back to TI version 9 which was more reliable than ver 10 and contained most of the features I needed.
    The point of this thread is that I do not think the problems with TI 11 are restricted to the hotplug issue but are deeper. I am particularly irritated by its automation. Have you ever tried to control a scheduled backup?
     
  22. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    I have never created a Secure Zone but if I do a restore with ATI 11, I get the safely remove hardware prob. This has been repeated on several machines with diff hardware. I don't deny that the prob can spring up after creating a secure zone; I'm just saying that one doesn't have to create one for the prob to show up.

    It would appear that at least two situations can create the problem:

    1) doing a full disk restore with ATI 11
    2) creating a SZ (or possibly creating a SZ and activating recovery manager)

    What these two sistuations have in common might narrow down the prob for Acrdonis for finding a fix.
     
  23. controler

    controler Guest

    I have also recreated the hotplug problem by doing a full disk restore.
    Everytime you do a disk restore, you will get the hotplug problem back.
    I am sure it will show up doing other restores say from external drives also.

    they only crash I see on my Dell machine is when I leave my USB stick in the drive, then reboot and do a system clean with default settings. It will crash everytime. This wouldn't be a critical issue either because how many people leave their USB stick in , reboot and do a system clean with ATI 11? LOL

    Thsi will happen even after updating the hidden drives. My WIndbg always points to snapman driver which is tied to two other ATI 11 drivers and the ONE MS driver VolSnap.sys Funny how while ties snapman to volsnap they created the name snapman LOL
     
  24. controler

    controler Guest

    Not sure this matters but if you go back and look at my capture TXT file in post above, you will notice no keys are deleted or added that deal with Geneic Volumes, don't see any values added only see values deleted and changed.
    this was captured while doing the Generic Volume drive update

    And I could only catch before boot info
     
  25. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    Thanks for keeping up with this issue. Maybe this thread should be sent to Tech Support?
     
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