No IEEE 1394 Firewire support on Rescue CD?

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by boejoe, Aug 17, 2004.

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  1. boejoe

    boejoe Registered Member

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    I just upgraded from B 764 to 768, hoping that the new build included support for my portable Firewire hard disk but it's still not there. I was able to create the HD images on the same drive fine under Win XP (Home Ed) but the drive was not visible on the rescue CD's GUI. Fortunately this drive also has a USB-2 interface and when I use that
    one with the rescue CD, the portable drive and the backup images are visible and accessible. Are the TI developers aware of this Firewire problem? The TI documentation claims IEEE 1394 support, so what gives?

    I prefer using it instead of the USB-2 interface because USB is a CPU hog compared to Firewire.
     
  2. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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  3. leehigdon3

    leehigdon3 Registered Member

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    Dennis, I have exactly the same problem. Since the end of June I have been waiting for some response from Acronis that helps. All I've been given is the old "try acpi=off noapic". That doesn't help. I've run reports for Acronis support using AcronisReport.exe and have gotten nothing back in return. I think the frustration people here are having is that with all the problems being reported, there doesn't seem to be any resolutions coming back. It's great that you're here to field questions, but if resolutions to real problems aren't forthcoming, then it's all just a waste of everyone's time. I'd like to hear some thoughts coming back from Acronis support as what may be causing this problem with external drives connected via firewire. Are my expectations out of line?
     
  4. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Could you please tell me the ticket number? I will check.
     
  5. leehigdon3

    leehigdon3 Registered Member

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    Yes. Thanks. # 114743.
     
  6. leehigdon3

    leehigdon3 Registered Member

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    I did receive a response from Acronis this morning. However, it was for more information without specific instructions for how to provide it.
     
  7. tazdevl

    tazdevl Registered Member

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    FYI Norton Ghost 9.0 will be out in a couple weeks. They bought PowerQuest, the maker of Drive Image, so I suspect it should be a decent product.
     
  8. leehigdon3

    leehigdon3 Registered Member

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    One never knows. The pressure to roll out new product inevitably trumps doing the job right the 1st time. I suspect that Acronis is becoming acutely aware of this fact, day by day.
     
  9. boejoe

    boejoe Registered Member

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    A couple days ago I also sent in a report.txt file generated by that Acronis report program but after reading your posts, I wonder if it was a waste of time. My sense of it is that they forgot to include the IEEE 1394 drivers on the rescue CD created by TI. I'm lucky I have a fallback to USB-2, though I hate the high CPU processing time requirement of USB compared to Firewire. If they don't fix the problem, they should at least remove IEEE 1394 support claim from the TI documentation.
     
  10. wdormann

    wdormann Registered Member

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    I don't think they forgot.
    I believe the issue at hand is that IEEE1394 support is experimental with Linux 2.4, which is what ATI is based off of.
     
  11. jofallon

    jofallon Registered Member

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    Ah! thanks for the info. My rescue CD can see the firewire drive, but verifying a 2 gig file when using the rescue CD takes over 6 hours ( I stopped it after that point).

    To put it another way, though, TI 8 does not "support" firewire in any sense in any meaning of the word "support" that a normal person would understand.
     
  12. wdormann

    wdormann Registered Member

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    True... a blanket statement that ATI supports Firewire may be somewhat misleading. Yes, it does work for some people. Others, not. From the rescue CD, it's depending on the underlying Linux OS to provide Firewire support. When run from Windows, it's depending on the Windows OS/drivers for firewire support. It's not a clear yes/no situation.

    Here's more info about Linux and Firewire support
     
  13. leehigdon3

    leehigdon3 Registered Member

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    I greatly appreciate the information you have provided. Had it come directly from Acronis, I would have appreciated it even more ;).

    So as not to come off like someone who doesn't understand the ways of the world, sales and marketing is what I do for a living. But I would be eaten alive by my customers if my technical support folks took this much time to provide cause and corrective action to a solution I sold someone. In fact, I probably would be looking for new customers to replace them.
     
  14. boejoe

    boejoe Registered Member

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    What do you mean by "underlying Linux" in context of a Windows software? I was running TI in XP (Home Ed) which supports the IEEE 1395 interface just fine and that's what I was using with TI to create my backups on the portable hard disk. So it works fine under full Windows version. Oh, it just came to me that what you probably meant by Linux references was that the rescue CD's bootup software was based on Linux which would make sense, of course. Is that really what you meant?
     
  15. wdormann

    wdormann Registered Member

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    When you boot from the rescue CD, it's booting up a Linux-based operating system. At this point, the software is totally OS agnostic. Any functionality that you have when using the rescue CD is functionality provided by the linux operating system. (With respect to device drivers, etc)
     
  16. jofallon

    jofallon Registered Member

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    I think what it really means is that Windows-based backups work quite well, using the native drivers. Restores using the Linux-based boot CD will probably not work. If it took 6 or so hours to not fully verify one 2 gig part of my 40 gig backup, I'd say the boot CD restore process will probably not work with firewire.
     
  17. boejoe

    boejoe Registered Member

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    Well, Linux kernel 2.6 has been out now for a while and it probably has a much better IEEE1394 support in it. So when is Acronis planning to use that one?
     
  18. noonie

    noonie Registered Member

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    My understanding is the older kernals work better than the newer for firewire.
    Is TI 8 experimental too?
     
  19. boejoe

    boejoe Registered Member

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    Good news! I figured out how to make the external Firewire HD recognized by the rescue CD software. Apparently the secret is to boot up with the rescue CD from cold start, that is from the power-off state. When you just reboot from Windows XP without power-off, the IEEE1394 interface is not recognized by the Linux system of the rescue CD and that's what I was doing before. This to me indicates that perhaps Windows XP sets the IEEE1394 interface to a state that is not reset by simple reboot and that state then is not recognized by the Linux on the rescue CD. So all you guys who had similar problems with the Firewire interface while running the rescue CD, might want to power off the PC for a few seconds and then power up with the CD to see if that solves your problem, too. I hope Anton Gromov reads this message too, because he was my contact at Acronis on this issue.
     
  20. fphall

    fphall Registered Member

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    WOW! That works like a charm! Thanks for the work-around, its made things a lot easier and faster for me. What a shame Acronis couldn't figure this out.

    FPH
     
  21. wdormann

    wdormann Registered Member

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    boejoe, fphall:
    Is your BIOS setting for Plug & Play Aware OS (or similar) "Yes" or "No" ?
     
  22. boejoe

    boejoe Registered Member

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    Yes for me.
     
  23. fphall

    fphall Registered Member

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    yes it is
     
  24. boejoe

    boejoe Registered Member

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    Well, let's be fair here. This is a relatively minor issue compared to all the other ones that they did solve. Besides, as some other people noted, the problem is more in the third party software they used for the rescue boot functionality (Linux) than in Acronis per se.
     
  25. wdormann

    wdormann Registered Member

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    Well, I see that being a potential problem. A good test would be to set that to "No". There are no adverse effects by doing this. I'm not even sure why they have this as a BIOS option, and even more surprising why it might be set to "Yes" by default.

    If this is set to "No", then the BIOS will assign IRQs for all PCI/Plug & Play devices. This is a good thing. If it is set to "yes", then the operating system is required to do all of the IRQ dirtywork. It's just a hunch, but perhaps after Windows assigns the IRQ information for the PCI devices and you warm boot, that configuration is not cleared out and Linux (TrueImage) gets confused.

    Set the BIOS option to "No" and see if that has any effect on whether you can use the Rescue CD and Firewire from a warm boot.
     
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