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SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

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SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby George Tyndall » Tue Nov 02, 2010 1:30 am

Using True Image 11 Home, I'm trying to do a Restore from an external HDD of a previously-validated mirror image on the Win 7 machine in my signature.

Acronis days says my 900GB C Drive has space for only 100MB, so it wants to resttore the partition as follows: C:->D.

In an attempt to avoid this, I quit Acronis and peformed an F11 restore of the OS and programs as shipped from the factory, however, when I then used the Acronis startup disk to restart, I got the same result.

If I allow my active drive to have drive letter D, which has over 900GB of "unallocated space," won't I have problems later when updating, adding new programs, etc.?

#-o
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby Bob » Tue Nov 02, 2010 2:26 am

Are you restoring the C drive using the bootable rescue disc? If your backup is a TI 2010 archive, try restoring from a ti 2010 rescue disc.

You definitely don't want to restore your system drive to D:, you will have problems.
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby George Tyndall » Tue Nov 02, 2010 2:55 am

Bob wrote:Are you restoring the C drive using the bootable rescue disc?


Yes, but it's a TI 11 Home disc and archive.

Bob wrote:You definitely don't want to restore your system drive to D:, you will have problems.


Problem is. when I did a F11 Restore, I got the same result. Should I use instead the restore disks that came with the system to get back to a 900GB C Drive then restore from the TI 11 archive?

BTW, I have only one internal HDD, not C and D drives like on my XP machine

#-o
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby Bob » Tue Nov 02, 2010 3:10 am

Does the drive show that small capacity with no unallocated space in Disk Management? If so, Acronis probably overwrote the internal tables in the hard drive. In the old days that would need a low level format to correct. You can't do that with a modern drive. Check the manufacturer to see if they provide a utility to reset the drive capacity so that the entire disk can be recognized again. I think Seagate includes a reset utility in their Seatools package. My son-in-law ran into that problem using Acronis to clone a drive and the reset utility was unable to reset the tables because of an error in the internal disk structure overwritten by Acronis. He ended up sending it back -- it was still in warranty. Hopefully, your problem isn't that severe.
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby George Tyndall » Tue Nov 02, 2010 9:59 am

Bob wrote:Hopefully, your problem isn't that severe.


Is there a reason that, once Acronis has completed the Restore, I can't simply, using Disk Management, change the drive letter from D to C?

Or, if that isn't an alternative, shouldn't replacing the internal drive with a new one and then running my Acronis archive solve the problem?

#-o
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby Bob » Tue Nov 02, 2010 6:33 pm

George, what exactly does Windows Disk Management say about that drive. What does it say about the drive capacity and any partitions and unallocated space?

I'm trying to understand whether Acronis did something to the drive that affected the drive capacity at a low level or whether something else is going on.

If you restore to D instead of C, it's quite possible you won't be able to boot at all. Even if you can, you won't be able to simply change d to c using disk management. Windows trys to protect the running system drive and won't let you change it. There is also the issue of how the boot manager sees the drive and how the boot record is set up.

If the low level capacity value in the disk was modified, format and installs etc. will see the smaller capacity. A new disk should allow you to see the full size, but before you go that route, let's see if we can figure out what's really happening.
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby George Tyndall » Tue Nov 02, 2010 7:43 pm

Bob wrote:A new disk should allow you to see the full size, but before you go that route, let's see if we can figure out what's really happening.


Here is the sequence of events:

--After creating a System Restore Point -- as I always do before making any changes of any kind to my system -- I downloaded the latest version of iTunes, as it has some desirable features
--upon discovering that the new version will not allow me to convert an mp3 file to WAV format like my previous version of iTunes will do, I attempted to restore my system
--System Restore informed me that it was unable to restore my system to the point that I had just created
--as I had a recent mirror image, I opened Acronis and attempted to restore from the TI 11 validated archive on an external HDD
--when I saw that the restore would take an estimated 11 hours, I cancelled the Acronis restore (likely the fatal mistake) so I could try a different System Restore point as suggested by Windows
--upon restarting I got a message that Windows 7 was loading files, but nothing happened, despite waiting for an hou4r or more (and the scoll stopped moving)
--so I restarted with F11, the idea being to go back to the Windows factory image, after which I would once again attempt a restore with Acronis
--but Acronis informed that Drive C has only 100MB of space and only 75MB is available, therefore, because D has over 900GB of "unallocated space," the Restore would be C>D
--Acronis has just now informed me that “The data was successfully restored” and is aksing me to click OK, however, after reading what you wrote most recently, I have not yet done so but am instead awaiting your further instructions

Thank you.

P.S. This communication is with my XP machine. (BTW, with Time Warner Cable, I am currently getting 11.5mbps download, and it has allegedly been as high as 32mbps -- in both cases from a Los Angeles server via DSLreports.com. But if that is true, why is it that, when I download, say, a program, I never get more than 1.5mbps or so?)
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby Bob » Tue Nov 02, 2010 10:15 pm

You might as well click ok and see what happens. The disk has been written to and all that remains is for Acronis to clean up and terminate.

I'm assuming that the same drive has the 100 mb partition and the 900 gb partition, if so the low level capacity field has not been overwritten. That's a good thing. Windows 7 creates a small partition when it is installed on an unformatted drive -- that sounds like your 100 mb drive -- but that is normally not given a drive letter. It's a non-standard partition format and deleting it with a program that doesn't understand the Windows 7 partition structure could corrupt the partition table. I'm not sure why Acronis thought that was C:.

Early versions of Acronis TI 2010 didn't handle that hidden partition properly. Did you ever install upgrades or just use the initial installation from the box. Was the backup image taken with Acronis TI 2010 or 2011?
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby George Tyndall » Tue Nov 02, 2010 11:07 pm

Bob wrote:You might as well click ok and see what happens. The disk has been written to and all that remains is for Acronis to clean up and terminate.


Result:

BOOTMGR is missing


Bob wrote:Early versions of Acronis TI 2010 didn't handle that hidden partition properly. Did you ever install upgrades or just use the initial installation from the box. Was the backup image taken with Acronis TI 2010 or 2011?


TI Home 11 is the only version I've used.
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby Bob » Wed Nov 03, 2010 2:37 am

What type of backup did you make. Did you back up the entire system disk or just the system partition? I'm assuming the backup was of the system disk in this computer, correct?

If it was a full system disk backup for the same drive, you should try doing a full disk restore. I have TI 2010 not 2011, but I'm assuming the procedure is the same. Boot from the rescue disk and choose Acronis True Image Home (full version). Select recovery > disk and partition recovery and choose the image backup to use. Right click onthe the backup and choose recover. At the methods step, select recover whole disks and partitions. In the what to recover screen, be sure to also check the "MBR and Track 0" box. Select the target disk. It will probably prompt you to confirm deletion of the existing destination partitions. Do the restore.

Let me know what happens.
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby George Tyndall » Wed Nov 03, 2010 3:54 am

Bob wrote:What type of backup did you make. Did you back up the entire system disk or just the system partition? I'm assuming the backup was of the system disk in this computer, correct?


Correct!

Bob wrote:If it was a full system disk backup for the same drive, you should try doing a full disk restore. I have TI 2010 not 2011, but I'm assuming the procedure is the same. Boot from the rescue disk and choose Acronis True Image Home (full version). Select recovery > disk and partition recovery and choose the image backup to use. Right click onthe the backup and choose recover. At the methods step, select recover whole disks and partitions. In the what to recover screen, be sure to also check the "MBR and Track 0" box. Select the target disk. It will probably prompt you to confirm deletion of the existing destination partitions. Do the restore.

Let me know what happens.


I get the following message:

BOOTMGR is missing. Press Ctrl+A;t+De; to restart


Doing so (with or without the Acronis Disk removed) results, very briefly, in a blue screen with the choices F11, Esc, F10 and F9, followed by that same message:

BOOTMGR is missing. Press Ctrl+A;t+De; to restart


#-o
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby Bob » Wed Nov 03, 2010 4:48 am

You did check the "MBR and Track 0" box, correct?

That should have restored the entire disk to what was archived including the boot sector and the boot manager. It should have booted. This is not looking good.

Did you get either a Windows 7 installation disc or a Windows 7 repair disc with your system? If you did, you can boot from that and do a startup repair from the recovery option. Assuming that Acronis did restore the system partition on the drive, the startup repair will restore the boot manager. It only fixes one problem at a time, so it may require running 3 times.
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby AcronisSupport » Wed Nov 03, 2010 4:52 am

Hi George!

We're really sorry for you've faced this issue, and had a bad experience. Most probably, the issue was caused by the software incompatibility: Acronis True Image Home 11 is an outdated product, it's not developed, supported or updated anymore. Thus it was never modified to support Windows 7 and modern hardware. For this you would needAcronis True Image Home 2011 (on the Home Acronis Page of Acronis True Image Home 2011 you can find full functional trial license and User's Guide).

We can try, though, to bring your machine back to the working state. In case it got restored, and you receive this error, you can try fixing the bootrecord manually. You can find the instructions in Acronis Knowledgebase: (kb.acronis,com, article #1507)

Should you need anything else or have any further questions - feel free to contact us directly or via Forum at your earliest convenience, we will be happy to help you!

Thank you!
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby Chuck Engels » Wed Nov 03, 2010 10:16 am

Hi AcronisSupport,
Welcome to Muvipix and thanks for the info.
We have heard horror stories about Acronis 2011 on Windows 7, can you help convince us to continue using your product?
When are the current issues going to be fixed?

:wcm:
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2. Cybertron PC - Liquid Cooled AMD FX6300, 6 cores, 3.50ghz - 32GB DDR3 - MSI GeForce GTX 960 Gaming 4G, 4GB Video Ram, 1024 Cuda Cores.
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Re: SOS! Acronis Acting Strange

Postby Bob » Wed Nov 03, 2010 10:58 am

Chuck, did you ever have one of those days...

I don't know why, but until your post, I was seeing TI 11 and thinking TI 2011. Yes, Acronis TI 11 does not support Windows 7. It does support Windows vista which uses the exact same MBR, BCD, Bootmanager scheme as Windows 7. The standalone rescue disk should have still done a full disk restore. The question is, is the backup archive complete. One thing that differs in Windows 7 from Vista is that Windows 7 may have placed an additional hidden partition on the disk. I say may because if the installation of Windows 7 was done on an unformatted disk it will be there, but, if the installation was done on a formatted disk, it won't be there. TI 11 and early versions of TI 2010 didn't know how to handle that extra partition and that caused problems. Attempts to fix that in TI 2010 screwed up the software and it took a long time to get that corrected. Some features of TI 2010 never worked on Windows 7. I'm hearing that TI 2011 is very buggy too. I don't know what happened to Acronis, but the software development and support has gone way downhill. What used to be the best backup solution on the market has now become one that I can't in good faith recommend. It's a shame.

The knowledgebase article you mentioned does include the Windows Vista/7 boot record manual update procedure. You still need the Installation disc or the repair disk I mentioned. Besides typing the commands from the system prompt, both those discs contain a system repair option that will analyse the drive and issue the correct commands in the correct order to repair the boot record. If that does not fix the problem, the PC will have to be taken in and have the system reimaged to the original state.
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