Problem booting from ATI Product CD

I recently used ATI 10 to clone my old 40Gb drive to a new 250Gb drive. This went well and the new drive boots without problems to Win XP.

The old drive had appeared to be going bad (some blue screen errors) and chkdsk r fixed some problems. However the Hitachi 'Drive Fitness Test' didn't show any problems.

I decided I would use the old drive as a target to test restore from backup.

I created a full image backup to a network drive and verified it. Then I booted the ATI product CD, checked I could see the backup on the network drive and did a couple of file restores - all OK.

Next I temporarily removed the new drive and reinstalled the old one intending to test a full restore of the drive (less than 40 GB of data to restore). I then attempted to boot from the ATI CD but this time it would not boot. After the ATI splash screen it hung on 'Acronis Loading....'. Tried a few times all with same result, so no success so far with my restore test.

After switching back to the new hard drive, I could once again boot from the ATI CD.

If the old drive is invalid in some way would that prevent ATI from booting?

I will try getting the latest build, but I'd lbe grateful for any insights anyone can offer as to what is happening here.

 

Does the 40GB drive show up correctly in the comptuer's BIOS?

Did you have the SZ installed on the 40GB drive?

If the drives are IDE, is the jumper set correctly for Master/Single drive?

Does TI start correctly and detect the drive if you run TI in Safe Mode instead of Full Mode?

 

Thanks for the reply.

I'll check on this.

No.

The drives are IDE with jumpers set to cable select. When the boot problem occurred, only the 40GB drive was installed (in master position).

How do I select Safe Mode? (I was using the CD from the retail box).

 

If the Safe mode version of TI is on the CD then you'll get a menu that allows you to choose between the Full mode and the Safe mode versions.

Since you are using a Retail Box version of TI, it's probably an older build. I would suggest you download the latest build of TI 10 (4,942), install it and create a new cd (using the Acronis Media Builder program) that contains both the Full and Safe mode versions.

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Another option: If you connect the old drive (40GB) to the "slave" position on the cable and boot into Windows on the 250GB drive, does the 40GB drive show up correctly in Windows Disk Management? If it does, you may be able to delete the partitions (clear the drive) and maybe TI will see it correctly then.

If you have Disk Director (or another program capable of wiping drives) you could do a wipe of the drive (including a zero-out of the MBR) and see if that helps.

Does the Hitachi hard drive tester program have a feature to wipe the drive?

If you do wipe the drive and have both drives connected, make sure you wipe the correct one.

 

Thanks Mudcrab. That gives me a few options to try.

Good idea about the Hitachi program - it does have an 'erase disk' feature so I'll use that. Just typing the words 'erase disk' raises my anxiety level so I'll take the new drive out when doing this and restoring.

It'll be a few days before I have time for a good session with this. I'll come back then.

 

Good idea. I usually do this too. If only the drive you want to erase/wipe is connected, then you don't have to worry about accidentally wiping the wrong one.

 

Hello nickok,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please make sure you use the latest build (4942) of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home. To get access to updates you should first register your software. Don't forget to recreate Acronis Bootable Rescue Media after updating.

If updating doesn't solve the problem, please try booting with "acpi=off noapic" parameter as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

If the issue persists, please collect some information to let us investigate it thoroughly:

Please also create Acronis Report in the way described below:

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;
- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;
- Boot the computer from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;
- Collect the report file from the floppy.

Please create Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

If you not able to create Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) then please do the following:

- Boot your computer from Acronis Bootable Rescue Media 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 and choose "Full Version".

When the screen stop scrolling please write down the output information you receive (last 5-10 lines), or use a digital camera to make shots of the output screen. You can use Shift+PgUp and Shift+PgDn keys to scroll the screen manually.

Please also clarify, were you able to boot with Acronis Bootable Rescue Media before cloning?

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

I worked round the drive problem by getting hold of a second 250GB drive and using that as a target for testing restores. I also installed the latest TI 10build and made a new recue CD as suggested. This booted into Full Mode and the restore from the backup on the network drive ran successfully and booted up without problems (warm feeling).

The only thing I noticed was that after the restore finished and reported success, the UI locked up so all I could do was reboot. Same thing happened when I did the original clone operation.

Still not sure what's up with the orginal 40GB drive that was giving problems in the first place. I tried the Hitachi erase disk utility but this would not run because it did not recognize the disk as being a Hitachi drive (it is).

I tried formatting it from XP Disk Manager and this failed. I tried to run fixmbr from the recovery console, but the console failed with a blue screen.

Using the new Acronis Rescue CD I found that the Full Version will hang if this 40GB drive is installed as either master or slave. The Safe Mode version will load but does not see the drive or the network-attached drive.

I think this disk is due to retire. Backup/restore tools work OK with the new drives and my machine has gone from 40 to 500 GB.
Thanks for the help.