Acronis True Image Home v. 10 problem (doesn't work, avoid, in favor of Norton Ghost)

[raylopez99]

I have Acronis True Image Home v. 10 build 4942, running it on a four
year old Pentium IV running Windows XP Pro SP2. There are two
internal EIDE HDs and two USB HDs.

Up to now, I've been using Norton Ghost to restore my "C" drive with
no problems. Several times I've restored the entire C drive using
Norton Ghost when new hardware drivers were installed and crashed my
system (that is, getting a BSOD, and you have to restart in Safe
Mode).

Because Acronis has such a good reputation I decided in the last few
weeks to forgo Norton Ghost (a 2001 version that I boot from a CD) to
back up my C drive, using only Acronis v. 10 from inside of Windows.
Big mistake.

When in fact a new hardware driver (the usual suspect, the video card)
caused my PC to crash, I tried to load an image file of the C: drive
that I had just backed up using Acronis. Much to my surprise, the
image file, which was on a USB external HD, would not load. I got a
bizarre error message from inside of Acronis that was clearly intended
for an Acronis programmer (an error code that was a number). I was
running the program in "Safe" mode from inside the Administrator
account.

Luckily, I "rolled back" the drivers (all four of them, since I had
four different hardware driver updates--note to reader: don't
download and install more than one hardware driver at a time from
Windows Update--since you'll have a hard time figuring out which one
is the culprit) and restored my system to the way it was before.

Other factors: I have several antivirus/spamware/firewalls running,
and perhaps they somehow interfered with restoration, but Acronis
should have given an error message that I could read (like "please
disable all XYZ programs.."), but, since I was running in "Safe" mode
in Windows, I doubt these programs were even loaded.

In short, Acronis, at least for my system, and when trying to reload
an image file to restore a HD from an external (USB) drive, doesn't
work.

I'm going back to Norton Ghost, which is free.

Acronis does seem to work for simple backup of data files, as opposed
to image files of an entire drive.

Beware--when you need this program the most, it might not work.

RL

 

[BIC]

I have Acronis True Image Home v. 10 build 4942, running it on a four
year old Pentium IV running Windows XP Pro SP2. There are two
internal EIDE HDs and two USB HDs.

Up to now, I've been using Norton Ghost to restore my "C" drive with
no problems. Several times I've restored the entire C drive using
Norton Ghost when new hardware drivers were installed and crashed my
system (that is, getting a BSOD, and you have to restart in Safe
Mode).

Because Acronis has such a good reputation I decided in the last few
weeks to forgo Norton Ghost (a 2001 version that I boot from a CD) to
back up my C drive, using only Acronis v. 10 from inside of Windows.
Big mistake.

When in fact a new hardware driver (the usual suspect, the video card)
caused my PC to crash, I tried to load an image file of the C: drive
that I had just backed up using Acronis. Much to my surprise, the
image file, which was on a USB external HD, would not load. I got a
bizarre error message from inside of Acronis that was clearly intended
for an Acronis programmer (an error code that was a number). I was
running the program in "Safe" mode from inside the Administrator
account.

Luckily, I "rolled back" the drivers (all four of them, since I had
four different hardware driver updates--note to reader: don't
download and install more than one hardware driver at a time from
Windows Update--since you'll have a hard time figuring out which one
is the culprit) and restored my system to the way it was before.

Other factors: I have several antivirus/spamware/firewalls running,
and perhaps they somehow interfered with restoration, but Acronis
should have given an error message that I could read (like "please
disable all XYZ programs.."), but, since I was running in "Safe" mode
in Windows, I doubt these programs were even loaded.

In short, Acronis, at least for my system, and when trying to reload
an image file to restore a HD from an external (USB) drive, doesn't
work.

I'm going back to Norton Ghost, which is free.

Acronis does seem to work for simple backup of data files, as opposed
to image files of an entire drive.

Beware--when you need this program the most, it might not work.

RL

you can say that for all BU software.........EVEN GHOST cos it f'k up my
father hard drive.

when you buy a firework you don't know its gona work until YOU light it.

Acronis is very good when used by a competent person.

 

[raylopez99]

you can say that for all BU software.........EVEN GHOST cos it f'k up my
father hard drive.

Ghost has worked fine for me. TO each their own.

when you buy a firework you don't know its gona work until YOU light it.

Acronis is very good when used by a competent person.

How would you know? Have you tried it to restore a boot drive image?

RL

 

[BIC]

Ghost has worked fine for me. TO each their own.


How would you know? Have you tried it to restore a boot drive image?

RL

yes....

dj
a competent person

 

[spodosaurus]

I'm going back to Norton Ghost, which is free.

Since when?

--
spammage trappage: remove the underscores to reply
Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant. Please
volunteer to be a marrow donor and literally save someone's life:
http://www.abmdr.org.au/
http://www.marrow.org/

 

[raylopez99]

Since when?

I'm using the free Norton Ghost 2002 CD that I got at eBay for $1 +
shipping. For all I know it could be pirated, but it works fine. YOu
have to book from your floppy (using Windows 98) or from the CD
(ditto), but it does clone HDs (twice I've used this) and it does an
image backup of your root drive. But you need to copy the root (C
drive to a FAT32 drive partition not on the physical drive, which I do
(my seperate D: drive,which has a FAT32 partition on it just for this
purpose). Norton Ghost, unlike Acronis, has saved me countless times
(at least a half dozen) when doing a restore of the image (root)
drive.

RL

 

[M.I.5¾]

Ghost has worked fine for me. TO each their own.


How would you know? Have you tried it to restore a boot drive image?

I have no idea if BIC has, but I have certainly restored a boot drive on
several occasions with success*. the most serious problem that I had was
restoring to a HP machine where the Trueimage boot disk wouldn't recognise
the HP mouse. This was but a minor inconvenience because the same result
could be achieved by using the keyboard 'ALT' key to select what was wanted.

What you do have to do is to do a trial restore to an old (or new) disk to
find out what snags if any you are going to meet and find a way round them.
Do this before you *have* to do a restore in anger when it usually far
harder to work around any snags.

*and on at least two occasions when the operating system corrupted.

 

[M.I.5¾]

I'm using the free Norton Ghost 2002 CD that I got at eBay for $1 +
shipping.

This must be some new usage of the word 'free' with which I was previously
unfamiliar.

 

[HDRDTD]

I was a long time Ghost user myself from way back when you ran it from a
single floppy. (version 5 or 6)

I've discovered that Ghost was fine up and until Symantec bout it and came
out with Ghost 2003. From there on it was all downhill. Much more complex to
use, etc.

That's when I heard about Acronis Trueimage and downloaded their 15 day
trial version, I think that was back at ver 8 of Trueimage.

I've never gone back to Ghost since.

I haven't had a single problem with Versions 8,9, or 10 in both backing up
and restoring anything.

I'm sorry that it's just not working properly for you.

 

[J Spitzer]

Ghost has worked fine for me. TO each their own.


How would you know? Have you tried it to restore a boot drive image?

I have and I have had no problem at all.
I used to use Ghost but have been using Acronis for about 2 years or
so with absolutely no problem at all. Sorry it didn't work for you but
I must report that it is exactly what I need. By the way all of my
backups are boot drive images..

 

[John Doe]

Because Acronis has such a good reputation I decided in the last
few weeks to forgo Norton Ghost (a 2001 version that I boot from a
CD) to back up my C drive, using only Acronis v. 10 from inside of
Windows. Big mistake.

When in fact a new hardware driver (the usual suspect, the video
card) caused my PC to crash, I tried to load an image file of the
C: drive that I had just backed up using Acronis. Much to my
surprise, the image file, which was on a USB external HD, would
not load.

The main mistake was not verifying that it/you can do a restore
before you counted on the software to work for you. If you've played
around with Windows for thousands of hours, you learn that trick, to
doublecheck that the software does what it's supposed to do and what
you've told it to do.

RL

Another option for backing up your Windows partition is Partition
Manager 2005 (or whichever). By the way. One trick/workaround to
using Partition Manager is to change the settings so that virtual
operations are enabled and so that partitions are hidden after a
copy... and... then when you copy a partition that you want to be
hidden, you right-click and Unhide/Hide that partition before
executing any changes. For some reason, Partition Manager requires
the partition just copied and hidden to be toggled like that,
otherwise it ends up being unhidden after the reboot when the
partition management processes occur.

 

[John Doe]

Software isn't fireworks, you can test it first.

A competent person wouldn't compare software with a firecracker.

I have and I have had no problem at all.

I have and did have a problem. For what ever reason, Acronis could
not restore a boot/Windows partition image from DVDs. But I checked
that immediately after making the copy, before counting on it. Since
I already have something that works, so I didn't bother
troubleshooting the issue.

Maybe next time the original poster will test the software first,
and then avoid cross-posting, as if the failure of the software
(without having tested it first) is earth-shattering news.

 

[DK]

Software isn't fireworks, you can test it first.


A competent person wouldn't compare software with a firecracker.


I have and did have a problem. For what ever reason, Acronis could
not restore a boot/Windows partition image from DVDs. But I checked
that immediately after making the copy, before counting on it. Since
I already have something that works, so I didn't bother
troubleshooting the issue.

I use Acronis and thus far it never failed in anything, including
restoring image from a DVD.

DK

 

[Lil' Dave]

I have no idea if BIC has, but I have certainly restored a boot drive on
several occasions with success*. the most serious problem that I had was
restoring to a HP machine where the Trueimage boot disk wouldn't recognise
the HP mouse. This was but a minor inconvenience because the same result
could be achieved by using the keyboard 'ALT' key to select what was
wanted.

What you do have to do is to do a trial restore to an old (or new) disk to
find out what snags if any you are going to meet and find a way round
them. Do this before you *have* to do a restore in anger when it usually
far harder to work around any snags.

*and on at least two occasions when the operating system corrupted.

I used the free version from the Seagate site (Acronis True Image). The
cloning did 2 things, caused the source XP drive to become unbootable
(cannot find hal.dll it said), and the target was totally unusable.
Imaging, did nothing to the source, but the restored version was not
bootable in any fashion. Both hard drives identical (Seagate SATA IIs 250GB
jumpered SATA I). I attribute it the non-standard bios routine of mapping
SATA to ide bus (first motherboards with SATA did this).

DriveImage 7.0 has no problems with imaging such partitions in the XP
environment and restoring to original locations with DI 7.0 boot media. The
latter 2 versions of Ghost are sourced from this software.

My conclusions are that True Image has never addressed such a condition that
may exist I previously mentioned. That is, its mixed up between the ide and
SATA settings. DI, on the other hand, only sees ide. The SATA does its
mapping via bios and doen't matter if DI sees it or not.
Dave

 

[raylopez99]

I have and did have a problem. For what ever reason, Acronis could
not restore a boot/Windows partition image from DVDs. But I checked
that immediately after making the copy, before counting on it. Since
I already have something that works, so I didn't bother
troubleshooting the issue.

Maybe next time the original poster will test the software first,
and then avoid cross-posting, as if the failure of the software
(without having tested it first) is earth-shattering news.

The whole purpose of these Usenet groups is to share information of
success and failure, not to break "earth shattering news"--I'll leave
that up to Reuters.

Thanks for sharing your tips in this thread.

RL

 

[John Adams]

I have Acronis True Image Home v. 10 build 4942, running it on a four
year old Pentium IV running Windows XP Pro SP2. There are two
internal EIDE HDs and two USB HDs.

Up to now, I've been using Norton Ghost to restore my "C" drive with
no problems. Several times I've restored the entire C drive using
Norton Ghost when new hardware drivers were installed and crashed my
system (that is, getting a BSOD, and you have to restart in Safe
Mode).

Because Acronis has such a good reputation I decided in the last few
weeks to forgo Norton Ghost (a 2001 version that I boot from a CD) to
back up my C drive, using only Acronis v. 10 from inside of Windows.
Big mistake.

When in fact a new hardware driver (the usual suspect, the video card)
caused my PC to crash, I tried to load an image file of the C: drive
that I had just backed up using Acronis. Much to my surprise, the
image file, which was on a USB external HD, would not load. I got a
bizarre error message from inside of Acronis that was clearly intended
for an Acronis programmer (an error code that was a number). I was
running the program in "Safe" mode from inside the Administrator
account.

Luckily, I "rolled back" the drivers (all four of them, since I had
four different hardware driver updates--note to reader: don't
download and install more than one hardware driver at a time from
Windows Update--since you'll have a hard time figuring out which one
is the culprit) and restored my system to the way it was before.

Other factors: I have several antivirus/spamware/firewalls running,
and perhaps they somehow interfered with restoration, but Acronis
should have given an error message that I could read (like "please
disable all XYZ programs.."), but, since I was running in "Safe" mode
in Windows, I doubt these programs were even loaded.

In short, Acronis, at least for my system, and when trying to reload
an image file to restore a HD from an external (USB) drive, doesn't
work.

I'm going back to Norton Ghost, which is free.

Acronis does seem to work for simple backup of data files, as opposed
to image files of an entire drive.

Beware--when you need this program the most, it might not work.

RL

Prbably because you used safe mode instead of the full mode. Acronis
needs to load a driver for your external USB HDD.

 

[raylopez99]

Prbably because you used safe mode instead of the full mode. Acronis
needs to load a driver for your external USB HDD.

Aha--good point, except for one thing: I could not load "full mode"!
I only could load safe mode! The corrupted video card driver on my C:
drive was preventing me from loading XP full mode. So, the only
solution, if I used your suggestion, would have been to nuke the hard
drive, reinstall Windows XP (hopefully a new installation would detect
my video card), reinstall Acronis, and activate it with the activation
key (and hope that Acronis doesn't mind if I reactivate the program
twice), and then, once in full mode in XP using Acronis, try and
reinstall the C: (boot) drive image from the USB drive, like you say.
That would have been a huge risk, one that I was not prepared to take
(since if reloading of the C: image fails, you're stuck).

However, I'm glad you suggested this, since I suspected the reason
Acronis failed may have had to do with the sensitivity of the boot
sector image (C: drive), and that if I was restoring a non-C: drive,
like the seperate D: drive I maintain, probably I would not have this
problem (since if the D: drive crashed likely I could load Acronis
under the Windows XP full mode). So, I intend to use Norton Ghost for
the important C: drive, and Acronis for the less-critical D: drive (I
keep my data on the D: drive, and very few applications on it).

RL

 

[Timothy Drouillard]

Well, usually you start with a working system, then you install Trueimage on
the system. From there you have Trueimage create a bootable recovery CD for
that system, which would then contain all the drivers necessary for that
system.

Later on, if you then need to perform a restore, you boot from that CD to
perform the restore. In that case, even though the current video driver was
bad/incorrect/corrupt, the driver on the restore CD should be a working
driver since it was working properly when the restore CD was created.

Unless of course you actually replaced/changed the video card itself (or
another piece of hardware), it which case, you should have re-created the
recovery CD.

 

[raylopez99]

Well, usually you start with a working system, then you install Trueimage on
the system. From there you have Trueimage create a bootable recovery CD for
that system, which would then contain all the drivers necessary for that
system.

Later on, if you then need to perform a restore, you boot from that CD to
perform the restore. In that case, even though the current video driver was
bad/incorrect/corrupt, the driver on the restore CD should be a working
driver since it was working properly when the restore CD was created.

Unless of course you actually replaced/changed the video card itself (or
another piece of hardware), it which case, you should have re-created the
recovery CD.









- Show quoted text -

Thanks. I did not realize that with the Acronis "Bootable Recovery
CD" (which I did have a copy of) that it would have all your drivers
to make your particular system work--I thought it was just a generic
bootable disk like BART is.

Still I'm going to make a habit of using both Acronis and Ghost going
forward, with your tip in mind.

Thanks,

RL

 

[Timothy Drouillard]

Thanks. I did not realize that with the Acronis "Bootable Recovery
CD" (which I did have a copy of) that it would have all your drivers
to make your particular system work--I thought it was just a generic
bootable disk like BART is.

You're welcome.

That's why you have to install Trueimage and THEN create the recovery CD.

Otherwise, the CD as it comes could be sold as a bootable CD.