S-ATA and P-ATA problem

Hello everybody,
I recently upgraded my system and I now have a S-ATA HDD that I use in conjunction with my old P-ATA drive.
The last one is configured as slave on the only available IDE channel, it has got a single partition (E: ) and it's disk number 0 for the system.
The S-ATA drive is disk number 1 and is divided into 2 partitions (C: for the OS and D: for data).
The letters have been assigned by Windows XP and are correctly configured for my needs.
The problem is, when I boot the PC with Acronis Rescue Media, the program assigns the letters in a different order (C: for the only available partition on disk #0, the P-ATA one. D: and E: for the two partitions on the S-ATA drive, that is disk #1).
I guess this causes some troubles to Acronis, because - when I save the image under Windows - the partitions have certain letters assigned by the OS.
Anyhow, when I try to restore the back-up and True Image reboots the PC in order to complete the operation, the letters are different and the machine hungs up, doing nothing.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Best regards.

 

When you make the backup in Windows, which partitions are you backing up, and where are you storing the backup.

I'll assume that you backup only the C partition (partition 1 on SATA drive 1), and that you store the image on the E partition (partition 1 on PATA drive 0).

When you try to restore the image, the source and destination will have different letters, but that shouldn't make any difference. One way to make the drive assignments clearer is to give each partition a name so that you don't need to rely on figuring out what the letters refer to.

For example, name C on the SATA drive in Windows BOOT, D in Windows DATA and E on the PATA drive OLD. When you restore, you will be restoring an image from OLD to BOOT. The system should boot normally after the restore is completed.

 

Hello jmk94903,
so, you're telling me the operation should be successful even if the partitions have different letters when True Image reboots the PC.
I have to try booting via the Acronis Rescue Media, because - when I let TI reboots in order to complete the operation - all I see is the message 'Loading Acronis bootup...' or something like that.
Then, the screen goes blank and nothing happens.
If TI does not succeed in rebooting the PC, I can try to restore the back-up using the rescue media, right?
Without caring too much about the letters, is that correct?
Any clue on the reason why TI is not able to reboot anche complete the restore process? (Without the rescue media, I mean)
What would happen, if I saved the image onto the P-ATA drive instead of writing it to the second partition onto the S-ATA drive?
Best regards.

 

bladeOR,
Assign unique names to your drives and use the unique names as your guide when doing a backup or restore. Check out the article about unique drives in my signature below.

When you bootup using the user created recovery cd, are all your disks displayed?

Are you trying to restore your system partition or your data partition?

Where is the *.tib files stored that are being used for the restore?

 

Hi GroverH,
thank you for your answer.
Yes, when I boot the system using the rescue media, I can see all of my drives.
The partition I'm trying to restore is the system partition (first one on the S-ATA disk) and the image is stored on the P-ATA disk.
Moreoever, I already assigned unique names to the various partitions (the question is not that I'm not able to recognize the units).
Anyway, when I try to restore the back-up under Windows and TI tells me a reboot is necessary, the system restarts and nothing happens.
Before getting this S-ATA drive, I didn't have to use the rescue media; in fact, TI was able to reboot the PC and complete the operation without my intervention.
Best regards.

 

My system disk is an older SATA 120G in 3 partitions. You will get excellent results by booting up using the Recovery CD and restore the system partition from within the Recovery CD.

ATI requires exclusive access to the hard drive when restoriing. Perhaps there is something running which is preventing the successful switching.

 

Yes. The fact that they change during the restore using the CD won't matter.

It seems like TI doen't like something about the new SATA card. It might be worthwhile uninstalling and reinstalling TI if you didn't do a clean install to the SATA drive.

Yes and yes. Many people prefer to boot from the CD to do backups and restores.

Obviously, it's connected to the new SATA card since you could complete the operation before installing the card. Perhaps a different brand of SATA card would not have this problem, but that's only a guess.

I don't think that would make any difference. The reboot problem is happening before the image is loaded, but you could try this an see. As far as security, it's better to save the image on a different drive. That way if the SATA drive were to fail, you wouldn't lose your backup.

 

Hello blade0r,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please note that disk letters in standalone Acronis True Image 9.0 Home might sometimes differ from the way Windows identifies drives. This is because Acronis Bootable Rescue CD contains a Linux kernel and Linux has its own rules of drive naming. For example, the D: drive identified in the standalone Acronis True Image might correspond to the E: drive in Windows. This is absolutely normal and there is no need to worry about the difference in drive letters assignment. We may recommend you to name/label your partitions in order to avoid confusion.

Please note that the fact that standalone mode of Acronis True Image has different drive letter assignment is not connected with the issue you have experienced: "the machine hungs up, doing nothing" when you try to restore the image archive.

In order to investigate this issue please do the following:

First of all, please make sure you use the latest build (3677) of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home. To get access to updates you should first register your software.

If you already use the latest build and the issue persists please download the latest version of Acronis drivers, install it with disabled logging and see if the issue persists.

If the issue still persists then enable logging by running the Acronis drivers installation package once again, reproduce the problem and collect the c:\snapapi.log file. Also create Acronis Report and Windows System Information 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 step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the issue and try to provide you with the solution.

Please also create Acronis True Image Bootable CD using the latest build and try to restore the image when booted your computer from this Bootable CD. If you will not be able to load the full version of Acronis True Image when booting from the CD please try booting with "acpi=off noapic" parameter as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

If this not help then create Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post and send this sysinfo.txt file to Acronis Support Team.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

blade0r, the drive-letters you see when running Win aren't recorded on the HDD. In fact, if you have multiple copies of Win on different partitions on one HDD, each time you boot from a different one of those partitions, you could see different letters. And if you use Win's Disk Management to re-assign letters, and then you boot from a different partition, you'd see that the Disk Management re-assignments were gone. That's because each copy of the OS keeps the drive-letter-to-HDD/partition mapping in its own registry.

So there's no way for Acronis (standalone) to be sure of which letters are used by Win. If you imaged a disk like the one I described above -- different letter assignments when booted from different partitions -- how would Acronis know which letter mapping you wanted to use, even if it were willing to interrogate the various registries inside the image?