I've just killed the Secure Zone - how ?

Just goes to show a little (very little) knowledge is a VERY dangerous thing.

Maybe some kind soul can try to explain to this dunderhead what he's done wrong.

Just grabbed this free edition of Paragon Disk Manager mentioned in another thread and thought I'd have a play.

Basic Hard Disk of 27.9 GB

Extended partition of 4.6 GB containing Secure Zone Back-Up Capsule.

Soooo created new partition E of 7.8 GB via the wizard. All seemed to go swimmingly until reboot when the flash screen for F11 Acronis Start Up Recovery Manager says 'fatal error and something about not being to boot - press Enter to try and boot' Do so and then 3 stage check disk runs followed by a reboot. Same error from Acronis but this time I do boot into Windows.

Partition Manager now says

Basic HD 27.9
Logical Disk C 15.2
Extended Partition (Back Up Capsule) 4.8
Logical Disk E 7.8

Is it something to do with where I've created E ?

Whats to do next ? Delete Secure Zone ?

Seems somewhere I made a mess of it. Just don't want to make situation worse.

Thanks for any help.

 

Okay

I've tried to think this through and 'aid' myself.

Options were to try and delete Secure Zone, take space from E and put into C but I assumed that would still leave E but empty or delete E

Chose to delete E and have Acronis Start Up Recovery again - phew.

Now I have to find a way of reallocating the unallocated space from deleted E back into C - anyone ?

And what was my error in the first place ?

 

Old Monk

If you have a secure zone and then install the Acronis Recovery manager you will most likely have a conflict.

In my case the IBM / Lenovo secure zone uses F11 to access it and so does the Acronis. ( Acronis will modify the MBR , Paragon can also modify the MBR but does not need to modify it in order to work )

The correct procedure is: Get (new) laptop, make IBM/Lenovo recovery CD's before doing anything at all, install Acronis (am now getting fond of Paragon HDM), remove the secure zone and then backup.

The above is applicable in my situation where I have IBM / Lenovo laptops, you situation may differ.

To summarise: when playing around with backup / recovery software you do this when you get the PC and have nothing to loose. If you have a running PC and cannot affors to loose anything then it is a very dangerous thing to play around with, even with sofwtare that you know and have been using a long time (been there and done that)

best
Leonardo

 

Hi Leonardo

Thanks for the reply.

Maybe this is actually the wrong forum for this thread as Acronis TI has done nothing wrong here.

My Secure Zone and Recovery Manager have worked perfectly well for 12 months at least. By the way, I don't know what you mean by ''installing Recovery Manager''. This is default within installing Acronis is it not ?

My question is - by partitioning the hard drive I lost the secure zone and I suspect because of where I tried to create the new partition.

PS I have nothing to really lose data wise if I lose the secure zone. It's really a question of why it happened

 

I don't know if it is the default setting but it certainly isn't required unless you want the push F11 to do a restore when booting trick. I'd sooner have a vanilla MBR.

The recovery manager seems to have pretty limited usefulness and if your HD is dead it won't do anything for you.

 

Just a note:
1. The secure zone (without the Startup Recovery Manager) is optional. It is user created.
2. If the Startup Recovery Manager is checkmarked, then Acronis will create the Secure Zone and will use it to store its program files inside. The Startup Recovery Manager cannot function without the availability of the secure zone and its own recovery programs.
3. Backup archives files are deleted if and when the secure zone is removed.
4. Hopefully, you have other Acronis archives stored on other drives so that if you have an failure or virus, etc. you can restore your system from the alternative drive.
5. Always safer to do your experimenting on a spare drive.
6. Check the info about the "Secure Zone and Startup Recovery Manager" as listed in the "Useful Forum Threads" link below.

 

I'm not sure, but when you reparttioned the disk with Paragon, you took space from C to create E. That may have changed something on the SecureZone as well, so TI couldn't find it. Good work in deleting the E partition and getting the SZ working again.

If it were my computer, in TrueImage, I'd remove the Startup Recovery Manager. Then, I'd delete the SecureZone.

This will leave you with C at 15.2GB on your 27.9GB drive. You can then use Paragon to expand the C partition to as much as you want and create a new E partition if you want to.

Personally, I wouldn't create another SecureZone since you can't copy any backups out of the SZ. I'd just store backups in a folder on E for handy use and also copy them to an external hard drive or burn them to DVDs for external storage.

Remember, backups in a SZ are useless if the hard drive fails.

 

Hi

Sorry for the delay but thanks for all the advice guys.

Just got back to the laptop in question after trying to install PCLinux on the new partition - unsuccessfully I may add.

All sorts of weird partitions after that exercise

Anyway, I'm back at the beginning now so all seems well.

Definitely not now in the right forum for this thread but it was just to say thanks as always.