Failed to read from sector, ATI Home 2010 on Windows 7 with BitLocker partitions
Hi all,
this is just a post to inform you about some quirks with ATI 2010 when using BitLocker on Win 7.
I had a data partition bitlocked and when starting ATI, it complained with 'failed to read from sector xxx on harddisk 1'. I checked all partitions with 'chdsk /r' but to no avail. When I reasoned about the sector numbers being unable to read, I noticed that these sectors must be located at the beginning of the bitlocked partition.
After removing BitLocker from the partition, the problem was gone.
Even as I don't regard the behavior of ATI a bug, Acronis should do something about it. With the current error message, most users will think that their ATI installation actually has a bug. I would suggest some more meaningful warning instead - or a working way to deal with bitlocked partitions.
This sounds like the problem I am having but I have not found that Acronis has put this info anywhere to be found. I would like to try your solution. How do you remove BitLocker?
Hello Douglas,
Let me help you.
Actually, you do not need to remove BitLocker, you need only to decrypt your partition (of course if it's encrypted) and disable BitLocker. Here's a few steps on how to do it:
- Press Start button and type in BitLocker in Start Menu Search:
- Open the BitLocker Drive Encryption Program:
- Find the required drive and click Turn Off BitLocker:
- It will ask for a confirmation: "Your drive will be decrypted. This may take considerable time. You can monitor the status of your drive decryption". Just proceed by clicking Decrypt Drive
- Wait until the operation finishes.
Now you can back up the driver without any special precautions by Acronis True Image.
Please reply to this thread if the issue still persists, I'll be glad to assist you further.
Thank you
I am running Windows7 64 Bit with an SSD (256GB) on a Dell M4500. I would like to run Acronis True Image 2010. However I also want to run Bitlocker on this disk. Can I do a complete image and restore of a disk image with Bitlocker running? I was told I can do incremental backups, but not a image backup. Is that true?
Hello Jordan,
Let me help you.
The thing is that when you will restore the backup created from the partition protected by BitLocker, Acronis True Image will restore the data in the unencrypted state while the system is still aligned towards using the encryption drivers. This prevents it from detecting certain critical files properly and thus does not allow the system to log in.
Creating a sector-by-sector image from Acronis Rescue Media and then restoring it will let you have a bootable system.
See Creating a Sector-By-Sector Backup with Acronis Products and Standalone Version of Acronis Software.
If you back up a non-system encrypted partition, you can then restore it successfully.
Disabling BitLocker and then backing up the system partition will also result in the successful restore and bootable Windows Vista. But backing up with disabled BitLocker will take a considerable amount of time as compared to backing up a regular non-encrypted partition.
Please reply to this thread if you have any further questions.
Thank you.
I didnt really understand your response, so let me re-state what I thought you said above...
1. I must turn off bitlocker and un-encrypt completely before I create a proper backup image that can be restored later.
2. once I have unencrypted and created a new backup image, I can create a new backup image
3. then I can turn on bitlocker again
is that right?
Hello Jordan,
Let me explain:
You should turn BitLocker off and decrypt the partition before backing it up. And any time you're going to create a backup of a system partition protected by BitLocker within Windows, you'll have to decrypt it again.
Another workaround possible is to create a sector-by-sector backup from Acronis Bootable Media.
Thank you.