seagate disk wizard broke TI and i cant fix it

TI says I need to reinstall because there is a problem with the serial number. This happened just after I installed seagate disk wizard to do a low level format of a seagate drive. I ran the install program but it fails to modify, repair, or uninstall. By "Fail" I mean that after the TI Home install program loads, instead of a GUI popping up it says "something interrupted the installer" please start the installation over.

I cannot install TI home
I cannot repair it nor can I uninstall it.

This all worked fine before disk wizard was intalled and my serial#'s and software were bought and downloaded directly from acronis online. Disk wizard seems to include the same or a "lite" verson of TI and googleing I see other people reporting problems, but not exactly like mine. I cannot run disk wizard any more because I no longer have the seagate drive and it wont run without one.

by "low level format" I mean I ran seagate's disk zero program to force a pending failed sector to be relocated. AFAICT this tool is missing in acronis TI or DiskDirectory.

 

Hello BeemerBiker,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Backup software.

You are quite right saying that having both Acronis True Image Home and Seagate Disk Wizard on the computer simultaneously is like having two instances of Acronis True Image Home software. So this really can cause the problems. In your case I'd recommend you to reinstall Acronis True Image Home in the following way:
- Uninstall Seagate Disk Wizard via Add Remove Program in Control Panel;
- Then please try to uninstall Acronis True Image Home in the same way;
- No matter whether you could perform the previous step or not you should run Acronis CleanUp utility to remove all the traces of the program;
- After that please clean your Temp folder (C:\Users\[Your Account Name]\AppData\Local\Temp if you run Vista or C:\Documents and Settings\[Your Account Name]\Local Settings\Temp if you run XP) and install the latest build of Acronis True Image Home.

As for the "disk zero program" unfortunately I couldn't find any instances of it in Seagate Disk Wizard. Somehow or other Acronis Disk Editor, which is a part of Acronis Disk Director Suite provides you with a low-level disk editing tools you can use I think.

Thank you
--
Nikita Sakharov

 

solved: seagate disk wizard broke TI and i cant fix it

OK - I already had the microsoft uninstalled as i had to use that for nero last year. That worked. However, before it worked, i deleted the temp files and also downloaded and ran that acronis clear utility. The did not work. I ran your clear utility and pressed "Y" for all answers except the last where I put in "T" because I didnt want to delete the disk director suite. Anyways, all that did was get rid of the "remove" button on the true image add remove property list in that control panel. An installed failed so I then found and ran that microsoft uninstaller.

That seagate software needs a warning not to use it if you got TI already installed.

As far as the "low level format" I am sorry I used that term or the expression "Zero disk". I needed to re-write all sectors of a failing seagate hard drive. The symptom was that one sector that was "off line" had been placed into the relocation queue. According to the smartdrive documentation one must force the relocation by re-writing the sector which is hard to do on a cached drive. I looked in my disk director suite 10 but there was no tool to write "zeros:" to the drive surface but I googled and found that the seagate disk wizard could do that. I downloaded and ran the utility and it did force the bad sector to be relocated.

I think your company sells a separate product that writes various patterns to the drive surface for when you want to sell the drive and dont want anything left on it. i didnt want to buy that as I just wanted to force a write on a sector that was queued for relocation. The smartdrive statistics does not show the sector number, it just give a count of how many sectors need to be relocated. If I knew the sector # I could have used your disk editor to write to it.

I suggest your disk director sute have the ability to read a sector, write a pattern to the same sector position, then write the original data back onto the sector. I assume you can turn off the cache to make it work. I use "speedfan" to monitor my hard drives and periodically check the smartdrive status info and that was how I found out about this.

Anyway, thanks, it is working.

 

Hello BeemerBiker,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for delayed response.

We are glad to hear that your issue has been solved and you can use Acronis True Image successfully.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Please be aware that the feature of writing zeros or other data patterns is included into Acronis True Image 11 Home along with some other data security features. Please see chapter 16 "Security and Privacy Tools" of Acronis True Image 11 Home User's Guide for details.

Please notice that as you already own a previous version of Acronis True Image, you can purchase an upgrade installation package at reduced price (as compared to independent installation package).

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov