Error removing USB devices after cloning

Hello all,

shieber, I've already forwarded all the information from this thread (well, and link to the thread itself) to our Development Team and they're already working on this issue.

I should thank you all for the information posted here and for deep diagnostics performed. To be honest, I was impressed with the amount of work done.

Thank you.

--
Michael Levchenko

 

Did anybody try this : ONE LEFT CLICK and you can "Safely Remove Hardware" from a little dialog box which appear near to try icon, just like before. I know this way not solved problem, but is alternative to remove hardware on convenience way. I also have the same problem, after using ATI 11, but I notice this just right now, and after short search I find this explanation here :
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/simplycomputers2/message/153950

 

Exception occured while tring to run shell32.dll "hotplug.dll"

I cloned the system disk yesterday (12/9) and now receiving this error trying to remove a USB device (CF card).

How do I receive the patch mentioned above?

 

boky, that's how I always remove my usb devices - one left click to bring up the device then a second click to select it.

 

I have the same problem! I cloned my 'c:' last night, everything went well, but this morning when I tried removing a USB device I got the error
"An exception occured while trying to run shell32.dll control_rundll hotplug.dll."

I see a file hotplug.dll in
c:\windows\system32
and
c:\windows\systems32\dllcache

 

Thre's no patch that I know of. Just right click My Computer and select Properties, select Hardware, Device manager, select View, select View Hidden Devices, and then for each Genric-volume entry under Storage Volumes, right click and select update and let windows try to find a better driver for the Generic volume. If windows says it doesn't a better driver, that's okay, but it will probably update at least one of the entries. Then close down the device manager and reboot. Prob should be gone.

 

I have had exactly the same problem, relative to the "Hotplug" issue. And the solution suggested (in device manager) works great. In addition I have found that version 11 will not restore an image to my new Gigabyte GA-X38_DQ6 based system with a raid array. It simply crashes when the restore disk is used.
I found a solution on another thread which saved my about 50 hours of reloading labor by using Bart PE and a Mustang plug in.
My point is that I wonder what is going on at Acronis. I have been a user and supporter since version 7, but in view of these (and maybe other) problems Norton Ghost is looking better all the time! Come on Acronis, get busy.

 

The problem is that Acronis "upgraded" to a new version linux for ATI 11, which just goes to show, a newgrade is not necessarily an upgrade, but it's almost always a pita. Eventually, when they have done enough, debugging, tweaking, and added apprpropriate error handling, it will probably handle more hardware than the old linux.

And don't forget, just when you think you've got everything working well, playing nicely together on your hardware, another new version of one of them comes out.

 

I have the same problem ATI 8064 german, Please help

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=186433

 

Look through this thread. The repair is to update your Generic Volumes under the Hardware Manager (make Hidden Devices visible to see Generic Volumes on the tree). It's annoying to have to do it but only takes a minute and then a reboot.

 

Hello Everyone,

Due to the headaches that I paid for by purchasing TI V11, I decided to drop this product and I finally got my refund from Acronis.

Above all, I decided to avoid paying money for cloning software from now on and get the simple, reliable, and free linux tools to do exactly the same thing. With these linux tools, I have successfully and reliably cloned my entire disk including windows as well as linux partitions in very short time.

With this approach, I'm now relieved but I do sympathize, however, with those who are suffering with Acronis products. I strongly recommend dropping these commercially unreliable products and use the free and reliable linux tools. Good luck.

 

Glad you found something that works for you. But I'll note that one man's solution is another man's problems.

Apples, PCs, Windows, Linux, ATI, Paragon -- they've each got more problems than a user should have to bear.

 

I am having the same problem when trying to "Safely Remove" a USB drive:

'An exception occurred while trying to run "shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll" '

The USB drive has .tib images, but was not used for backup or cloning. I simply copied some .tib images to the USB drive.

I was not aware that this problem was related to ATI 11 until I did a web search and came directly to this thread. I do have ATI 11 installed.

CD

 

I cloned a new drive yesterday using Seagate DiscWizard and discovered a short time ago I had the same problem.

The fix below corrected it.

Thanks...

PS Two of the three volumes got updated.

 

Just a quick "hello" and many thanks to all for finding the solution.

I used the free trial version to clone a Seagate 40GB IDE drive to a new 150GB Seagate drive, after the Seagate version refused to work properly. As Seagate are advertising the DiskWizard program on their site I guess many more people will be having this problem!

Again, thanks to those who spent time sorting out the solution.

I did notice that DiskWizard also has a program called BartPE, which isn't installed by default. I notice this make a pre-installation disk, has anybody used it? Any comments?

 

Ok, after a bit of experimentation I think I know EXACTLY what the problem is.

After cloning, I think TIH has to create new volume entries for your newly cloned disk
.
This is because the new disk has a different volume signature from your old disk.

For each partition on the harddrive, you'll end up with registry entries like this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\STORAGE\Volume\1&30a96598&0&
Signature4F627F12Offset3686556C00Length3FFABD200

Within that registry tree, there's a STRING value:

DeviceDesc REG_SZ "Generic volume"

THIS STRING VALUE IS CORRUPTED. It doesn't appear corrupted in regedit, probably because the
corruption occurs after the string terminator or because regedit can't show the corrupted characters.

Ok, after a bit of experimentation I think I know EXACTLY what the problem is.

After cloning, I think TIH has to create new volume entries for your newly cloned disk.

This is because the new disk has a different volume signature from your old disk.

For each partition on the harddrive, you'll end up with registry entries like this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\STORAGE\
Volume\1&30a96598&0&Signature4F627F12Offset3686556C00Length3FFABD200

The text in BLUE will be different for every user - it's disk/partition specific. Within that registry tree, there's a STRING value:

DeviceDesc REG_SZ "Generic volume"

THIS STRING VALUE IS CORRUPTED. It doesn't appear corrupted in regedit, probably because
the corruption occurs after the string terminator or because regedit can't show the corrupted characters.

Anyways, I changed the permissions on my 5 registry keys that AIH created so I could edit them.
Next, I renamed all 5 DeviceDesc names to DeviceDescBAD. Next, I created 5 new DeviceDesc STRING entries, and set
each string to "Generic volume". Next, I deleted all 5 DeviceDescBAD keys. Finally I removed my permissions from the keys.

After I did this, now there are no funny/non-ASCII characters in Device Manager (show hidden devices -> storage volumes).

Also, now I don't get a crash/error when I do a safely remove hardware.

I have repeated this "fix" on my other bootable partition. It works.

The problem is simple: Acronis Home is corrupting the registry with bad string entries for the DeviceDesc string value
.
If this string value is deleted and re-created correctly, the problem goes away.

Users who are uninstalling the generic volumes or reinstalling drivers are probably getting the same effect because that will cause
these corrupted string values to be re-created by Microsoft correctly.

It might be possible to write a "fix this bug" application, but it's a bit tricky because the registry keys can only be fixed by changing the registry key permissions.

Bit.

PS: I do wonder if there are any other registry corruptions that have not yet bubbled to the surface that may lying in wait to crash our systems. Hmmm.

 

Updated information...

Ok, it seems that the problem is that the DeviceDesc string value "Generic volume" is not zero-terminated. All strings need a NULL character at the end which marks the end-of-string. This NULL character is supposed to be INCLUDED in the string length count for registry API functions (this is Win32 programming related).

I was able to make the problem go away simply by selecting each DeviceDesc string in regedit, double-clicking to edit, and just press OK to re-write the "Generic volume" string value. Doing this corrected the problem, probably because when a string value is set using regedit, it WILL correctly NULL terminate the string.

Also, this MAY NOT be a bug with AIH directly. As far as I can tell, AIH does NOT create these new registry values. The volume signature is different on a cloned drive, but I think WinXP itself has to re-create the new volume keys. This may actually be a bug in WinXP when it has to create new volume keys for the main hard drive upon rebooting. Mind you, I have cloned disks with Norton Ghost, and I have not seen this problem with Ghost - so I'm not sure what Ghost does differently than AIH does.

Also, this problem didn't occur in Vista. I cloned my vista partition too, but I had no volume key corruptions and USB insertion/removal works flawlessly.

Bit.

 

I ran into this very same problem for the first time earlier this evening. After doing a web search, I found this topic. What struck me immediately was that the word "Acronis" came up in the search. I've been having problems with TI 11 for the past few days, and based on all of the above, there seems to be no doubt that TI is causing this.

I tried the suggested Device Manager procedure, and in Device Manager I noticed what looked like a corrupt generic volume. It was the words "generic volume", followed by four small squares. I did the "update driver" procedure as suggested in previous posts, and the problem immediately disappeared after a reboot.

BTW, a big thumbs up (and thanks) to the members who posted the solution.

 

BRILLIANT!

I too have a Dell 4600 and upgraded from my failing original SATA 120GB to a Seagate SATA 300GB (ST3300631AS). I use Dantz Retrospect 7.5 to backup to a Maxtor external USB drive. I used Acronis Easy Migrate 7.0 to clone the drives. Every time I tried to backup, Retrospect would say "preparing backup" then I would get the blue screen of death (BSOD) error saying "Bad_Pool_Header Stop: 0x00000019". Dantz told me to do a repair install of Win XP Pro (ugh.)

The device manager fix outlined above worked perfectly. I uninstalled each Generic Drive (listed in the hidden storage devices) and rebooted once to redetect (leaving the Maxtor USB drive connected and on) and once after Windows detected the devices. No more BSOD! Thank you.

 

This is not happening to just clones made with Acronis. I use Apricorn EZ-GIG II, and just had the exact same error.

 

It could be that Apricorn's software is based on the Acronis engine (I believe Seagate's software is, and it reportedly has the same problem). See if the fix works. If so, it is pretty coincidental that both products fail to make the proper registry entries.

 

This could be worse than it first appears.
I just finished building a new computer for a recording studio (XP, Cubase, Wavelab 5 audio editing and CD/DVD burning program.., new Sony/NEC Optiarc DVD RW). I set the system up at home, tested everything, backed it up with Acronis TI 11 Home and brought it to the studio (I don't have internet access there). A few tweaks led me to restore an earlier image to check a few settings, then back to the newer image. Then I noticed the Safely Remove Hardware applet crash, which led me to go back to an older .tib image again. When that didn't work, I reloaded the newest backup image and went home to research, thus finding this site.
Yes, the fixes suggested above worked for the USB issue, BUT - Wavelab (an excellent audio editor) won't burn CD's, Windows Media Player will burn them, but puts markers every 4:35, and mis-locates markers on purchased CD's. And the kicker:
My DVD burner, which had 5 region changes a week ago (I haven't played any DVD's on it) now has 2.!. I am tempted to repeat that last line. Think about it - this is Hardware Damage!
And no, I still haven't fixed the burning issue, which I am sure is related to the Acronis backups/restores. The fixes that worked for the hotplug issue do not work for the CD issue. And there is no way to get those region changes back (not that I plan on watching a DVD from the Phillipines, but where will it end up being locked at).
Any feedback appreciated. Go check your region changes!

 

Update:
The burning issue I mentioned with Wavelab may be unrelated to Acronis, but the DVD region change losses are. The times I supposedly 'changed' the regions matches the times I have restored with Acronis, and there is no other possibility for the loss. I will start another thread on it.
The fix for the USB removal problem metioned by BITCRUSHER works well. Thanks for the work hunting this issue down. The corrpution in the registry will cause the 'safely remove hardware' applet to either not function properly, or, even if left-clicking, cause a sponteneous reboot, which defeats the purpose (might as well unplug your hotswappable during reboot).

 

Another 2-cents worth...

I've never used TI 10. I skipped it, and went from TI 9 to TI 11.

As soon as I did my first partition restore (system drive) with TI 11, I got the dreaded "exception error" (shell32, hotplug, etc.) when trying to "safely remove" USB devices.

From my experiences and from reading numerous interesting posts in this thread, my own assumptions now are...
- Creating a Secure Zone may cause the problem, but it's not a prerequisite (I don't have one);
- Restoring a system partition with TI 11 certainly causes the problem;
- It makes no difference whether True Image is or is not installed.

A Windows repair install may well fix the problem, but it seems like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Much easier and quicker to do the "Device Manager fix" contributed by a valuable forum member.

In my case, I had the good fortune of stumbling across this thread only in the last week or so. It saved me attacking Microsoft, re-trying partition restores, pulling my hair out, attempting an OS repair install, or even fiddling with trying to reload drivers for hidden devices in Device Manager. I simply double-clicked 2 or 3 registry entries. My thanks and gratitude to BitBasher, who seems to have contributed a comprehensive explanation of the underlying problem - perhaps what the Device Manager approach also happens to fix.

I'm also a little surprised that in the nearly 3 months since BitBasher offered that valuable information, he has received no recognition for it. From what I can tell, his two posts here (#116 and 117) have been his only posts so far. Please don't let apparent lack of acknowledgment stop you from further valuable contributions - at least some of us are impressed and grateful.

I'm even more surprised at the response, or lack thereof, from Acronis. This thread started some 11 months ago. Acronis didn't join in until last October! Then in November they added a post asking us to see if a new version fixed the problem! Another brief appearance last December to say that they were working on it. In April, nearly a year after first reports and when there is enough info here for my dog to get to the bottom of it, I upgrade to the latest version only to find that this problem is still there. Very disappointing.

 

Update...

It's been fixed! Only took 10 months. See posts #4 and #11 in thread "Shell32.dll (USB Errors)".

Now all we have to do is wait until they let us have the fix - "Next week" according to Acronis on March 5th or 6th; then later "most probably ... in the next build".