Acronis TrueImage-problem: after crash, second harddisk not anymore accessible

[simon]

Hi,

after booting TrueImage 6 from floppy and selecting
the backup image of partition c: (stored on the
second harddisk), TrueImage shortly crashes after
starting to write the image back to partition c
(to the 1 harddisk/FAT).

The problem is now that during that crash, TrueImage
made a drive-letter mix, means partition c, does not
have anymore a drive letter assigned. (the boot partition
("c") is neither accessible if booted from DOS 8.x
nor from Ghost2003)and for making the thing really
interesting, TrueImage does not even see the
second harddisk.

I really hoped to have finally found a reliable
imaging alternative to Ghost. Unfortunately TrueImage
is not very reliable. If it has something to do, that
TrueImage it`s Linux-based, I really don`t know...


Simon

 

[Bob Harris]

I have had excellent luck with TrueImage (version 6) under
XP. (Well, except for my latest PC which uses serial ATA
hard drives, that TrueImage can not see. But, for normal
IDE hard drives, and USB or firewire drives it has always
treated me well.)

An important note: I backup partitions, not disks. If
the first hard drive has only one partition, C:\, you
might think that these two options are exactly the same,
but that might not be true. Backing up the C: partition
does not include the boot record. Backing up the C:\ disk
probably does. Norton GHOST also has this subtle
difference.

Now to your problem: I speculate that the failed restore
destroyed the master boot record, without which the hard
drive appears unformatted to XP. I would also appear
unformatted to DOS and probably to LINUX. A way to test
this hypothesis is to go to the XP disk management tool
and see whether it shows two hard drives, one of which
is "raw" or "unformatted". Alternatively, download some
fundamental disk tools, such as Seatools from Seagate (or
similar form Maxtor, IBM, WD, etc) and see whether they
see two physical drives. If they do, then the following
fix might work:

Boot from the XP CDROM into the recovery console and look
into the options for the command "FIXMBR" by typing
FIXMBR /? at the command prompt. To get a complete list
of recovery console commands, type HELP. For more info on
the XP recovery console try these links:

http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm

http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm

Good luck.