System Drive C:\ is damaged when Acronis 11 Mounts an image.

I am using a 4 year old Acer Laptop Travelmate 244 LM with Windows XP Home Edition with SP3.
This problem also existed with SP2, but there was no such problem with previous versions of Acronis.

Every time I mount an image from the archives on my external USB hard drive, it results in damage to my internal system drive C:\

By frequent observation of the System Event viewer I have seen 5 or 6 Ftdisk warnings whenever a mounted image is discontinued.
There is no indication of any problem when the image is mounted or used, only when :-
1) I ask Acronis to UN-mount a mounted image; or
2) If I shut down with the image(s) mounted, upon restart I find Ftdisk happened at shut down.
NB with the image mounted, nothing bad SEEMS to happen by closing and then restarting Acronis.

I was worried when I saw the description :-
"The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur."
But I took a little comfort from the uncertainty about whether or not corruption occurred,
and quiet relieved that nothing bad seemed to happen as a result - INITIALLY.

I have since found that Ftdisk warnings inevitably lead to NTFS damage that has to be corrected by chkdsk.
I wonder what other damage is also done that both I and chkdsk are ignorant off !!!

Typically chkdsk will report
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 6 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 6 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 6 unused security descriptors.

The only variations are that sometimes there are no "minor inconsistencies", and the quantity of "6 unused" varies between 4 and 7. This quantity is suspicously similar to the quantity of Ftdisc system errors.

I find that if I launch "Try&Decide" before I mount the image, I can mount the image, and immediately after I UN-mount the image the System event log has again captured Ftdisk errors,
and if I then tell "Try&Decide" to discard changes I get the customary shut down, and upon restart the Event log knows nothing about Ftdisk errors I had seen.
The DISCARD operation succeeded in pretending that nothing bad happened.
The discard operation FAILED in that the "5 or 6 unused" errors survived and needed chkdsk obliteration.

It makes no difference whether "Acronis Scheduler2 Service" and "Try and Decide" services are :-
at default "Automatic" (and "Started" when I log on),
or changed to "Manual", or to "Disabled".
I believe other Acronis Services could exist,
and I think I saw a total of three before SP3 was installed, but now I can see only two.
It also is not affected by "Distributed Link Tracking Client" service, which SP3 set to Automatic and I have now Disabled (and Image Creation now commences without the long delay).

Are there any other services I should change to Manual or Disabled ?

Normally (without using Acronis) if I tell "Safely Remove Hardware" to release the external USB hard drive, it tells me to try later. Only if I have closed all instances of file browsers (Windows Explorer etc) that were observing this drive does the drive get released.

When a mounted image is UN-mounted, the Ftdisk and chkdsk errors occur, even if I first close down all file browsers that may still be looking at the image - I guess Acronis has launched "something" that continues to demand continued availability of the image, and whenever and however the image is discontinued this "something" has a tantrum and creates these errors.

Device manager -> Disc Drives -> USB-HS ST3320520A USB Device -> Policies
can be optimised for either performance or quick removal - but this has no effect on the problem.

Device manager -> Disc Drives -> IC25N030ATMR04-O -> Policies
has an extra option "Enable write caching on the disk", which is checked, and the other optimise options are greyed out.
I suspect this MIGHT fix the problem, but that I would suffer a severe performance penalty,
and I fear that after 4 years without having to re-install Windows I might run out of luck.

After system start-up the P.C. spends a while before the login screen, and after I login it takes another 10 Seconds starting other things before it is prepared to allow me control.
SUDDENLY this 10 seconds was increased to 120 seconds - consistently upon every start-up.
After various failed remedies, I created an archive image to preserve the "current and final" system state, and then restored 3 previous images. Every restored image had the same 120 delay, even though no such delay had been present when each of these images was created. I restored the "current and final" image.
Fearing major disc damage that was not corrected by restoring a perfect image from happier times, I ran chkdsk.

I told chkdsk to "Fix file system errors" plus "recover of bad sectors", and it reported :-
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 1299 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 1299 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 1299 unused security descriptors.

There-after the start-up delay was back to 10 seconds.

When my daughter's IPOD SHUFFLE was first plugged into one of the USB ports for a recharge,
it not only trashed ALL FOUR USB Ports and caused a few Ftdisk errors in the System Event log,
and also put the external USB hard drive into continuous "inaccessible" and busy state (as if it was formatting).
I now believe that it also caused 3 different errors on each of nearly 1299 files,
and Acronis did the final bit of damage as it added the last 5 or 6 errors to reach the magic number 1299.

I consider myself lucky that chkdsk repaired the damage.
I prefer to avoid all damage and Ftdisk errors, rather than depend upon chkdsk always being lucky.

Coincidentally, half an hour after a chkdsk restart, when no errors were seen, all the lights went out in our village,
and my External USB connected Hard Drive immediately stopped because its power had failed,
but my Laptop happily continued on battery power.
I told chkdsk to "Fix file system errors" upon restart, and then closed down and waited for power restoration and normality.
After power was restored I eventually switched on the P.C. and found a couple of Ftdisk errors, and chkdsk cleaned up 2 unused etc.

I estimate damage from Un-mounting an image as :-
3 times as bad as shutting of power to an external drive;
0.5% of the havoc created when IPOD SHUFFLE destroys all USB Port connections.

I really want to eliminate this damage.

This may be unrelated, but I have noticed that when I create a new image, the event log often shows that after detecting a "backup location quota" violation and starting deletion, it shows up to 120 instances of "Archive.closed" errors, event numbers 26 through to 146, all created within about 20 Seconds, such as
<event code="26" id="136" level="2" message="Archive computer .closed" module="53" time="1214863236" />
These errors never occurred before version 11, and have not occurred since I ensured that any mounted images are UN-mounted before I commence Image Creation.

I REALLY want to continue a good habit of mounting the latest image and comparing all folders and files with C:\, and thus detecting any stray garbage that I can delete before I create the next image - but I am now afraid this is accumulating more damage to C:\, and I have no certainty that chkdsk can actually detect and correct all the things that go wrong.

Any solutions are advice would be appreciated - I am between a rock and a hard place.

Regards
Alan

 

Do you have the possibility to test your 'mounting' on annother PC (a friend or a colleague?)
I am wondering whether your external drive or your laptop is the culprit.

I assume the external hdd is external supplied with power?

 

I have several friends, but few use Acronis. They will be willing to help, but I do not know if they use Acronis 11.

My problem did not exist with a previous version of Acronis.

Yes, my external Hard drive has its own independent power supply.

Incidentally the external drive has a green power saving feature which operates after a time out or upon the computer shutting down.
Upon my second attempt at ever restoring an image, it failed.
I decided that the initial reboot sequence caused XP to tell all the USB devices it was closing down, and the external drive was still closing down when XP told them to wake up, so the external drive remained asleep.
I therefore totally disabled all these "green" features and it never again failed.

Regards
Alan

 

Hello alan_b,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

First of all make sure you are using the latest build of Acronis True Image 11 Home http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/updates/

I would also recommend you to test Acronis True Image Home 2009 http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/

If the issue persists submit support request using the following link http://www.acronis.com/company/contacts/request/index.html?t=2

Attach the following info to support case:

- Open Start\Programs\Accessories\System Tools\System Information;
- Choose the "Save" option in the "File" menu (or "Action" menu under Windows 2000), enter the "File name" and set the field "Save as type" to "System Information File (*.NFO)";
- Send us the saved file.

Download Acronis Report utility available at http://download.acronis.com/support/AcronisReport.exe and run it, create a report and send it to us? Please compress the Acronis Report output file into an archive (e.g. with WinZip) and attach to your message by browsing for the archive. This would provide us with detailed information on the hard disk partition structure.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev

 

Hi

I would like to try dis-mounting with all Acronis service processes terminated.
Would you please list all the Acronis services that may have started or may be running when an image is mounted ?

Sorry for the delays in responding.
Firstly I set I.E. security to maximum when Microsoft announced a recent threat that needed an out-of-cycle security patch that was not then available, and I then found that Firefox could no longer download *.exe files, so I could not update T.I., nor download your AcronisReport.exe.
Secondly, for Christmas my Laptop had its 30 GB hard drive replaced with 160 GB.

I can now report that the USB External drive is NOT implicated in the problem.

The earlier version of T.I.11 with the 30 GB drive,
and the latest version of T.I.11 with the 160 GB drive,
both show this problem.

I can copy on to drive C:\ either a single 4.5 GB image file from an external NTFS partition, or the 4 GB + 0.5 GB files from an external FAT32 partition, and then mount this copy on C:\ with no problems.
At the instant when I dis-mount the image, the system Event log captures Ftdisk errors.

I have also found that if I close all, or most, applications but leave the image mounted, I can then shut down the computer and reboot, and this avoids the FTdisk Errors.

The only way to avoid FTdisk errors seems to be to keep the image mounted and perform an orderly shut down with few applications running. This is an inconvenience I will tolerate.

I am now quite busy re-organising many other aspects of my "new" system.
I would however appreciate a list of Acronis services that are may be running after start-up or when an image is mounted. I recognise some processes in Task Manager as belonging to Acronis, but suspect that there could be others, and I could do a very quick and simple test to see if terminating ALL Acronis services would allow a dis-mount without a FTdisk error.

Regards
Alan

 

Hello alan_b,

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Our software enables these services after install:

* Acronis Scheduler2 Service
* Acronis Try And Decide Service

And it also starts the following processes:

Run Task Manager (press Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and terminate the following processes if present:

* Schedhlp.exe (Acronis Scheduler Helper)
* Schedul2.exe (Acronis Scheduler 2)
* TimounterMonitor.exe (Monitor for Acronis True Image Backup Archive Explorer)
* TrueImageMonitor.exe (Acronis True Image Monitor)
* TrueImageTryStartService.exe (Acronis True Image Try and Decide Service)
* TrueImage.exe (Acronis True Image application)

Please check this article for the detailed information about registry values, services and processes used by Acronis True Image Home software.

Thank you.
--
Alexander Nikolsky

 

Alexander

Thank you very much for that list.

The next time I have a brand new image ready to restore upon any Ftdisk errors I will once more mount an image, and then terminate everything you listed (with the exception of TrueImage.exe) and then tell TrueImage to unmount and see if this avoids the Ftdisk errors.

Then I will report back.

Many thanks
Regards
Alan