USB external Hard Drive issue

Howdy.... new ATI user having a little problem with one of my external drives and ATI 8.0..... I have 2 USB external hard drives and when they are both up and running upon launching ATI, the launch hangs as it is analyzing partition 2-1........... Eventually I get an error message saying that it failed to read from sector such and such and gives me the options to retry, ignore, ignore all, and cancel. No matter which choice I make, it continues to analyze the next partition untill I get a similar message regarding partition 2-2.... and so on. Eventually I have to resort to using the Task Manager to shut down ATI. I then remove the offending drive and relaunch ATI with no problems. Obviously there is a problem with this drive and ATI. The drive functions normally if I read or write to it otherwise. I'd like to be able to use this drive for redundant imaging. Any ideas why ATI is having a problem with this drive and what if anything I might do to correct them? Also I'm wondering exactly what is taking place when the drives are being analyzed when ATI launches. Thanks in advance for any input.

 

There may be a problem with the drive that TI is revealing to you. Many times a drive will appear to function normally when it has problems until you use a repair or test utility.

You didn't say what version of Windows you are using, but I'll assume it's Windows XP. With the questionable drive attached, right click on the drive and select Properties. Click on Tools and then Error Checking.

For the first test, don't check either of the boxes. Click OK to run the test. If it passes with no errors reported, repeat the procedure but check both boxes. You'll have to reboot to let the test run.

If you have a disk partitioning program (Partition Magic, etc.), use it to check the disk also.

If there is nothing you need to save on the drive (or if you can copy it to another drive), delete the partition on the drive, then recreate the partition and format it again.

Try launching TI again with only this drive attached. It TI still hangs, then I don't have any other ideas at the moment.

 

Thanks John.... yes, Win XP and I had just reformatted the drive thinking that might be a problem. It was formatted using FAT32 and I reformatted NTFS but it didn't fix anything. I will try your other suggestions and see where I get with that.

 

Hello blenderbender,

Firsts of all, please make sure that you use the latest build (903) of Acronis True Image 8.0 which is available at: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/updates/

To get access to updates you should create an account at:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/my/
then log in and use your serial number to register your software.

Please also check each partition of your external hard drive by Windows utility.

To do this please use Windows menu Start\Run, then enter the command
"chkdsk [drive letter]: /r" (without quotes and square brackets) for every partition of your external hard drive.

If the problem still persists after installing the update and checking your external hard drive then please create Acronis report as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Send this report to support@acronis.com along with the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Just a possibility, did you delete the old partition before reformatting? If not, that's worth doing as the first step. Then recreate the partition and format it NTFS as you did.

Last thought for the moment. Try the hard drive in a different enclosure. There have been some scattered reports of chipsets used in some enclosures being the problem.