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TrueImage 2015 + Windows 10 + Crucial CT500MX SSD = 100% disk use and frozen windows

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I've seen a reference to this elsewhere but I'm now having trouble with TrueImage 2015 which has been bombproof to this point.

My old SSD died (a Crucial M4-256, that never had any issues with Acronis TrueImage).  I installed a new Crucial CT500MX and restored my Windows 10 backup image on to the drive. Everything works fine - system boots, I can login, everything is rosy. (FYI the new SSD has the most current firmware on it, and the motherboard BIOS is up to date.)

BUT When Acronis TrueImage 2015 tries to backup the new drive, it hangs my machine. Over the course of the last 24 hours I've eliminated various services and other pieces of software as the culprit. And I now have a reproducable scenario:

Set TrueImage to do an image backup. Click "Backup now". I get the progress bar where it begins to calculate the size/time. At this point, in task manager, the CPU is still almost idling, but the Active Time on the SSD goes up to 100%. Read speed and write speed stay at 0Kb/s

After about 10 seconds, Windows becomes completely unresponsive and the only solution is a hard power-off and reboot.

I'm not using continous backup - only scheduled. When the schedule runs, or when I invoke a manual backup, that's when this behaviour happens. It appears to be when TrueImage is trying to snapshot the drive.

I've uninstalled and re-installed the software to see if there was something weird in the restored image but without any luck.

I took this screenshot from a different poster who had the same problem (and never got it resolved) - because when my machine locks up, I can't get a screengrab of the task manager.

For the time being I've uninstalled TrueImage, which means my home business PC is now not being backed up by this (up to now) great piece of software. On the plus side, since uninstalling it, I've not had any more issues with my installation hanging. (To be devil's advocated, I reinstalled it, set up a backup task, clicked 'backup now' and immediately it hung my machine again).

What's galling is that I've seen this issue reported all over the Crucial forums, as Acronis is the software Crucial bundle with this drive. But either the drive is incompatible with the s/w or the s/w is incompatible with the drive. There's a lot of finger-pointing going on but at this point I'm stuck with no backups, a three-PC license which I can only use on one PC. I'd say this is an Acronis issue because plenty of other pieces of  imaging backup software can handle the Crucial MX drives.

Any help would be appreciated.

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Hello Chris, we probably have more questions than answers for you at the moment - you seem to have done the major part of trying to isolate this problem.

Can you confirm that the product you have is the full Acronis True Image Home 2015 and not a Crucial bundled version of the product?

Assuming that you do have ATIH 2015, please confirm the build number you have?
Do you have the latest build 6613 version?
If not, please download a copy of the latest build installer from your Acronis Account and test with that.

Have you tried booting from either the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager or the bootable rescue media for ATIH 2015 (on CD or USB memory stick) - do you see the same issue?

If you can perform a full backup from the ASRM / Rescue media (outside of Windows), then this may indicate that the problem you are seeing is related to the Windows VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service).
You can temporarily disable VSS use by following the tip provided by Slava at https://forum.acronis.com/forum/45832#comment-346558

Finally, how long have you waited for the ATIH 2015 backup task to complete after the point where you say the whole system freezes and before you perform the hard shutdown and reboot?

PS What do the Acronis logs show for this problem?  C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs - in particular the service_ logs.  Note you can use the Service Log Viewer app to look at these.

Hi Chris, in addition to what Steve is asking, I'm just curious if CPU still goes to 100% if you set the CPU affinity on the Acronis application prior to running a backp?  Can you try launching Acronis, open task manager, find the TrueImage.exe application, right click >>> set affinity >>> remove CPU 0 so that the CPU is leaving one core for the OS and using the rest for Acronis.  You should not have to do this, but I am wondering if it will make any difference at all or not.

 

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Steve

First - yes - I have the latest full version downloaded from Acronis' website, so not the bundled version with my drive.

I am able to boot from my Acronis rescue CD - that's actually how I got my machine back. I booted from there and loaded the image from my backup on to the new hard drive, so that part of it works fine. (Restoring).

I've not tried to do a backup from outside Windows - I didn't know I could do that. 

In terms of how long I wait before hard powering off, now I know what the problem is, I don't wait at all. But in getting to this point I did leave it running for 4 hours at one point to see if it would recover and it never did.

Bobbo - the CPU usage is pretty much at idle once the disk active time goes to 100%

The Acronis logs seem to have been erased when I uninstalled it. I'll re-install it, force the problem to happen and then see if I can get a log on to this thread. I'll be back ...

Ok I'm back.

So I re-downloaded and re-installed from Acronis website (downloaded the full version from my account). Put in my serial, set up a backup job. An image of the SSD on to my server. Saved the settings, clicked "backup now" and this video shows you exactly what happened (100Mb just uploaded to my dropbox from my phone): https://www.dropbox.com/s/38ief9bhmnn6mj3/Video%20Apr%2009%2C%2013%2031…

You can see the instant I click 'backup now' the disk usage ramps to 100% with no read/writes.

So - hard reboot. Login, bring up services, disable the Volume Shadow Copy service. Opened up Acronis, selected my job and clicked "backup now". This time, the disk usage spiked at 100%, then started varyinh between 50% and 100% with read speeds and write speeds being non-zero. Windows is still responsive (I'm typing this while it's backing up). Applications can be opened and closed and all seems to be well in the world.

So...it looks like it IS the volume shadow copy service that is causing the issue. Interestingly, it wasn't a problem on the older SSD - also a Crucial unit.

I read Slava's response on the other link - looks like he discovered how to temporarily disable VSS only during backups. I edited my two backup scripts, manually re-enabled the VSS service, THEN re-ran Acronis with the scripts modified to show use_vss="false" and again, all is well.

This has been very helpful - now the question is - who is to blame? Crucial, Acronis or Microsoft ?  And can Acronis put this option in their software - "Disable VSS during backup image for SSD" or something like that?

Oh - I've also attached the service log from when it failed.

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Chris, glad to hear that you have isolated the problem to being caused by VSS and you have been able to circumvent this using the tip from Slava.

With regard to getting Acronis to add this as an option to disable VSS for specific backup tasks, then I would recommend using the Feedback Tool (in Help) to suggest this to the developers.

Now as to where the problem really lies, then I would be tempted to suggest that this is a problem within Windows on your specific system rather than a global problem affecting all systems or even just those with your specific Crucial SSD drive.

See KB document https://kb.acronis.com/content/36200 for troubleshooting information for VSS.

You may also want to run the SFC /Scannow System File Checker tool to ensure that all your system files are present and correct.

Good tip - I'd not done the SFC check since getting my PC working again. I'll look through the KB doc too.

Ditto to Steve's last post.  I guess the only way to determine the culprit (or narrow it down), would to push your image to another SSD and see if the same behavior appears after that.  VSS has been very finicky for me.  I had what I though was a pristine Windows 10 build myself - started from scratch (not an upgrade with Windows) , no Acronis upgrade either.  Acronis had been working fine locally and still was, but started a Cloud backup for the first time and found that it always got to 930MB and then failed on this one machince  I assumed it was an Acronis cloud issue, but turning off VSS finally allowed it to complete as soon as I did that.  I tried to trouble shoot it for days and then just rebuilt Windows again and all has been working fine since then.  No idea what happened to VSS or how to really fix the issue, despite scowering the Web and trying all sorts of thigns that ultimtely made me uncomfortable with my OS health anways.  

Example 2:  On my main PC I also started having weird Windows issues last week, not related to VSS though.  Again, this was another computer I would consider pristine.  Windows store wouldn't open - kept saying it needed another app to open it and no Windwos App store apps would launch. Happened out of the blue.  Rebuilt it from scratch and now there are no issues (that I can tell) again.  

Long storty short, OS and applications get corrupted or degraded overtime - especially when upgrades are involved.  A lot of people in these forums blame Acronis when their backup stops working, but I'm beginning to have less confidence in Windows in general as I continue to see these "anomolies" on my own system, which are completely outside of Acronis.  

We also have to remember that Windows 10 has already had a major "update" but that was really no different than upgrading from Win 7 to 8 or win 8 to 10... it'snow just being masked by using the same name since Windows 10 is supposed to be the "last version ever".   Call it what you will, but an upgrade is still an upgrade and I've never had much long term luck with upgrade performance so usually try to install "clean" when possible and that seems to provide the most reliability in the long run - Acronis or otherwise. 

When Crucial SSDs are involved, the solution is to return them as defective and purchase any other branded SSD. 

Steven Haywood wrote:
i bought TI 2015 in May, as an upgrade to 2014. I see now 2016 is available. I also see I only got a months' support with my 2015 purchase, and I'm not eligible for an upgrade to 2016. This sucks, especially considering now my product is unusable since I upgraded to windows 10 (crucial ssd bug?) and not getting any response to my posts or PMs. Starting to think I wasted my money and should seek other solutions.

2 days after uninstalling True Image and using alternatives...

Steven Haywood wrote:
Hmm, looks like I may owe Acronis an apology

There seem to be many reported cases of Crucial MX drives hanging, whether or not acronis is installed. Mine is still doing it, it seems to be something triggered by the backup process (maybe a bug in win8.1+'s volume shadow copy?) or AHCI driver or something.

I am going to throw this POS crucial away and get a samsung.

Ha!  Too true.  I've only used a handful of the Crucial MX100's in the past - wasn't impressed.  Have been sticking with Samsung Evo's for price and performance and have been very happy with them as a base SSD for upgrades and daily use.  The 840's had a bit of issues with firmware, but the 850's have proven to be very reliable so far (a few bad eggs, but we go through a lot of them at work so a couple bad ones are to be expected.)  Recently moved onto a Samsung 950Pro and am loving it!