Newbie questions re: TI Home v10

Just began using TI Home v10... my first Acronis product. Two questions:

1. I have partitions C/D/E on one drive, F/G on a second drive. MS Windows XP Pro is on C. D-G are user data. Very straightforward arrangement. I have begun backing up C... always as a "partition/image archive". Anticipating my future need to restore partition C, I have ventured down the restoration wizard a bit.. and become confused. The wizard allows me to:

- select the image archive (my partition C archive)
- specify restoration type ("disk or partition")
- partition or disk to restore (C, but MBR is also an option... see below)
- specify restored partition location (C, of course)
- specify restored partition type (active... it's for the OS)
- specify restored partition size (same as before)
- specify drive letter (C)
- specify that I want to restore yet another disk or partition

I assume that I should indeed go around again, this time picking up the MBR. When I do, it asks me to "Select a hard disk drive whose track 0 along with MBR you want to recover". The choices are my C/D/E drive and my F/G drive.

What does this mean, exactly? The manual is quite unclear on this point. If I'm restoring the image of partition C right back to partition C, why does TI offer a choice of not only the C/D/E drive but also the F/G drive? Furthermore, was the MBR backed up inside the partition C archive... or does TI propose simply to rebuild the C/D/E MBR from scratch?

I do understand a bit about MBRs... one per disk, partition table, boot code, etc. What I don't understand is whether MBRs are invisibly backed up, explicitly restored, simply rebuilt, etc. by TI Home.

2. When booting the "safe full" version of TI Home (I made my own bootable media, since I bought it online), it probes the USB and reports two identical minor errors ("USB device descriptor short read (expected 18, got 2)"). Then it times out for approximately 35-40 seconds... before launching and running correctly (my mouse is USB, for example, and it works fine). This 35-40 second timeout occurs every time I need to run the bootable TI. Can it be eliminated or shortened?

 

“partition or disk to restore (C, but MBR is also an option... see below)”
TI includes the MBR with a disk/partition image.

“I assume that I should indeed go around again, this time picking up the MBR”
Only if you need to, which I don’t think you do.

“Furthermore, was the MBR backed up inside the partition C archive..”
Yes.

“What I don't understand is whether MBRs are invisibly backed up, explicitly restored, simply rebuilt, etc. by TI Home.”
Invisibly backed up – yes.
As far as a restore; TI will not do anything with the MBR unless you tell it to.

I rarely use the boot CD, but I thought the “safe” and “full” options were mutually exclusive.

 

Your error #2 is either your USB device is sending the wrong data to your mother board hub during enumeration, which could be caused by a number of factors, or the USB driver built into the Linux kernel is flaky.

Without a access to a USB sniffer hardware or software, I can only gues at which part of enumeration is causing that message which would likely to be either where it is sending its version # or where it is sending the amount of bytes which should be in the packet.

Colin

 

Hello milo47,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please note that you should use `MBR and Track 0` restore option when by some reason you have lost or damaged your OS's boot loader. Normally, if you restore the system partition to its original location it is not necessary to restore the MBR. Please also take a look at this previous thread to find more information about restore of MBR.

As for the message "USB device descriptor short read (expected 18, got 2)" during boot process, please note that it indicates that one of your USB devices uses device number that differs from default one. In order to provide you with more information and a possible workaround could you please collect the following information?

- Boot your computer from the Acronis True Image 10.0 Home Bootable CD and press F11 key when the selection screen advising you to select either "Full", "Safe" or "Boot into Windows" option appears.

- After you get the "Linux kernel command line" prompt, remove the word "quiet", click on the OK button then and choose "Full Version".

When you get this message please write down the output information you receive (last 5 lines prior to this message), or use a digital camera to make shots of the output screens.

Also please describe what kinds of USB devices you use and create Acronis Report and Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov