Support for ICH9R AHCI?

I'm trying to use the bootable rescue CD of DD 10.0 build 2160 to copy a USB partition to a SATA partition in AHCI mode. When I do a full DD boot, DD can not see any of the SATA drives. If I start DD in safe mode, I can see the SATA drives but then I can't see the USB drives.

Is there a new version/build of the rescue media that supports both ICH9R in AHCI mode and USB at the same time?

Thanks.
Bruce.

 

bachastain:

This depends on the hardware. Most of the machines I've tried DD on will support both modes, but my new laptop does not support the "full" mode.

There have been rumors of a new version of DD circulating for several months now, but so far nothing. You could contact Acronis support and ask for a custom ISO that supports your chipset. Or you could run DD in one of the various recovery environments (BartPE, VistaPE, MustangPE).

 

Thanks k0lo. I contacted Acronis via the chat support and they aren't yet ready to release a new version of DD that might improve the AHCI support. Build 2160 is the current and only release. He suggested a way that I can use TI and DD in combination to do what I want. That's good enough for now.

 

I'm glad to hear that you have a workaround. My problem chipset is ICH8 on a Core 2 Duo L7500 mobile processor. Safe mode works for me because the laptop's BIOS has good USB support, so safe mode sees all attached disks.

Actually, my preference is to run DD 10 from VistaPE, so I don't really need the bootable recovery environment at all.

 

Mark, he also told me that DD can not be used to copy a partition from one disk drive to another, only within a single drive. However, now that I'm playing with DD, that doesn't seem to be true, at least not when booted from Windows XP. Does booting from the Rescue disk limit DD's ability to copy a partition from one drive to another? As far as I can tell, the lack of AHCI support in the Rescue disk is the only thing preventing me from copying a partition from a USB drive to a SATA drive (boot partition).

Bruce.

 

Bruce:

I never tried doing that, so I don't know. I usually use TI to make an image of the partition, then restore the image to another partition or disk.

If you have the room you could do the same. Create a TI image of the partition that you want to copy and store the image on the same disk but not in the target partition. Then, restore the image to the target partition. This could be done in safe mode if TI full does not support your chipset.

 

Mark, trying to make a long story short, I was hoping to avoid using TI on a USB drive, because I had a bad experience, one that I worked with support with off and on for months. While booting from Windows, it took about 40 minutes to create the TI backup of C: file to a USB drive, but when booted from the Rescue disk, the restore took well over 16 hours to perform.

At the time, I thought it was because the Rescue disk didn't support USB 2.0 speeds, because the restore seemed to be running at USB 1.1 speeds (yes, THAT slow), so I opened a ticket for it. But after many email exchanges and many specially made test versions, it came down to the NFTS drivers of the TI Rescue disk suck, compared to the Windows drivers. Restores from a FAT32 volume ran closer to USB 2.0 speeds. Also, the same restore under BartPE was MUCH faster. Eventually he had me try TI 2009, which improved the NTFS restore by about 300% over TI 11, and that was a big improvement so I closeed the ticket. Another interesting test was doing the restore, not from a local USB drive (in my case a 1TB USB 2.0 drive), but over a 1Gbit eithernet LAN connection from another Windows PC. That flew compared to the local USB NTFS drive.

Anyway, so I was hoping to use DD this time, but I guess that won't work with my AHCI SATA drives.

I have even more data now and was hoping on avoiding another painfully slow TI restore from a USB drive. But TI has improved since then so it should be less painful this time.

Thanks.

Bruce.

 

2009 works for me on ICH10R.