ATI 2021 Hangs on Splash Screen When Loading After Windows 10 v.20H2 Upgrade
Hi,
Yesterday I upgraded my Windows 10 x64 Desktop from version 1909 to 20H2. On checking that everything was still working OK, I found that ATI Nonstop had stopped. So I started up ATI from the Start menu in order to restart Nonstop. After the UAC, it displayed the usual splash screen. It got as far as "Applying user settings" (the very thin progess bar was a bit under halfway across) and there it hung - indefinitely. While it was hung, there was a lot of disk activity (looking for the user profile presumably - and not finding it). If there was a problem, I would have expected to see a useful error message, but it just hung while thrashing my HDD.
Clicking on the splash screen, I got the Windows message that the program was not responding, with the option to close the program. Selecting this option closed the splash screen, but the high disk activity continued for a very long time - only stopped when I rebooted the PC.
Although Nonstop had stopped, I found this morning that my two scheduled overnight backup tasks had completed normally, so that much at least still works.
I upgraded to ATI 2021 "Standard" (no cloud) at the end of September last year. After setting up 2021, it has run without any major problems - even Nonstop has worked reliably (for once).
My system is a Dell Precision workstation with 32 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD (C: drive), 1 TB HDD (D: drive), 9th Gen Intel i7 CPU.
I assume that I need to rebuild my User Profile, or perhaps restore it from a pre-upgrade (of Windows 10) backup. But I don't know how to go about either, or where the User Profile is stored.
I checked the logs using the MVP Log Viewer, but it only showed the logs of the backups performed (before the Windows upgrade and the two backups completed successfully overnight since the upgrade). No mention of any User Profile problem.
Any advice would be gratefully received.
Thanks in advance,
Pete.
Pete, if you continue to see the hang issue, then I would suggest doing a Repair Install of ATI 2021 to see if that will resolve it.
KB 60915: Acronis True Image: repairing program settings - for details.
Note: all my Win 10 PC's are running the latest 20H2 build with ATI 2021 without seeing this type of issue.
Thanks, Ian. I have looked through all the various logs, but they are way too technical for me. I found nothing obviously connected to the start-up of TrueImage.exe, nor any reference to user settings. I did find lots of error entries in many of the logs (some highlighted in yellow), but these go right back to the day I installed ATI 2021 last year, so I assume that since it has all been working fine up until yesterday and that I have had no error messages or notifications, that these are of no significance to the user. Rather like the Windows logs when viewed with "eventvwr.exe".
I did note, however, that many of the logs have lots of entries (maybe hundreds) just for today and many logged over just a second or two, when ATI is not actively doing any backups and TrueImage.exe is hung or aborted. Could explain why my HDD is going mad ?? Or are these coming from the various background programs/daemons?
No doubt the numerous logs were designed by numerous developers. I found the dates/times very confusing. Some times are UTC, some are in my time zone (UTC+11), some have no indication of time zone, most are 24-hour time, but some are AM/PM. Some consistency would help.
So basically I am still stuck. Perhaps I need to uninstall ATI 2021 and then reinstall it from scratch, but I no longer have access to the installer.
Pete.
Thanks, Steve. This link looks promising. I will look at it tomorrow and advise. Right now it is past my bedtime so I am signing off for today!
Cheers,
Pete.
Tried the suggested remedies in the recommended KB article "60915: Acronis True Image: repairing program settings".
Method 1 didn't work: Could not stop two of the services - AcronisActiveProtectionService and AcronisCyberProtectionService. Both of these brought up the error dialogue...
Unable to stop service.
The operation could not be completed.
A stop control has been sent to a service that other running processes are dependent on.
Of course that also prevented later steps in Method 1 from working. A suggested solution was to turn off the Protection feature, but it was necessary to do that from within the TrueImage.exe program - which will not start. Catch 22.
Method 2 didn't work: running the "task zap" function from the administrator command prompt gave the following error message:
rror (sic): 1723 (0x6BB) - The RPC server is too busy to complete this operation.
Method 3 hasn't worked so far: I downloaded the ATI 2021 installer program and ran it (a couple of times). After the UAC it displayed the message "Unpacking installer files" (or something similar) for a couple of seconds, then nothing! I was expecting the "Repair" dialogue shown in the KB article, but nothing. It started three processes in Task Manager: Acronis True Image Installer (32 bit) (times 2) and Acronis True Image Installer Shell (32 bit). Soon after starting the installer, these three processes displayed memory usage of 1.9 MB, 3.4 MB and 3.7 MB respectively, all with 0% CPU time and 0% Disk usage. I have let it run while writing this. Currently, after about 30 minutes run time, memory usage has updated to 1.8 MB, 3.3 MB and 3.6 MB respectively. Would I be right in suspecting that the locked Protection files are preventing the installer from working properly?
Maybe I need to reboot into Safe Mode and try to kill the Protection processes there?
Method 4 requires use of a cleanup tool to uninstall the existing software and re-installing from scratch. But will that work if some files or processes are locking out other attempts?
Anyway, I have run out of time to work on this today. Will try again tomorrow (what a time waster!). If anyone reviewing what I have done so far has any further suggestions, they would be gratefully received!
Cheers for now,
Pete.
Pete, the new protection features are a pain but they can be stopped!
To do this, you need to go into the main Windows Services control panel and then open the Properties of each service and set the Start option to be Disabled.
Next, do a Windows Restart and do not attempt to launch ATI 2021 (as will restart the services!).
This is the approach that I have used to fully disable the new Protection with the additional steps of renaming the disabled service executable files and removing the associated registry entries (which I do via a set of Powershell scripts & several restarts).
For the purpose of doing the Repair Install, doing just the first step above should be sufficient.
OK, latest attempts to get this thing working again. Unfortunately it has been several hours since I made these attempts and I have forgotten some of the details. But, in a nutshell, I disabled all the Acronis services and rebooted. Tried once again to run the downloaded installation .exe. Again, it ran the UAC and then "unpacking files ...", and then hung once again. Found that some of the Acronis services were running again, even though still disabled. Stopped them again and rebooted. Before trying to run the repair installation again, checked the services and found the same thing. Also checked the running processes in Task Manager and found three running Acronis processes: Acronis Scheduler Service Helper; Acronis TIB Mounter Monitor; and Acronis True Image 2021 itself! Found that these processes were all in the Startup tab as enabled. Disabled all three and rebooted yet again - this time there were no Acronis processes or services running. So tried another repair install and FINALLY got the screen with the Repair option. Ran this, took several minutes but finally finished with a Start Application button. Clicked this - after the UAC, the regular splash dialogue displayed - and hung again on Applying Settings... I checked the Processes tab in Task Manager and found that the usual Acronis tasks were all actively updating memory usage and CPU time, so I let it run and after about five minutes or so, the splash screen disappeared and I was finally back in the familiar ATI GUI, and that one of the missed backup tasks was already running. Even Nonstop was running again.
A couple of strange things happened though. About 90% of the way through a 44 GB File/Folder backup, it stopped with a message that the destination disk was running out of space. It only had about 10 GB left to back up and there was 299 GB unused space on the external HDD - the Acronis GUI even displayed that the available unused space was 300 GB! Retrying didn't work so I tried the "Ignore" option. It displayed another similar dialogue also with an "Ignore" option. Pressed Ignore again and the backup finished silently. Didn't get the usual "Success" email. Checked the destination folder and instead of the usual 44 GB .tib file (always *_v1.tib), there were two files - one was 40 GB (*_v1.tib) and the other was 4 GB (*_v2.tib). It is due to run again overnight tonight - hope it doesn't happen again. Might retry this backup later today to be sure. Not sure what was going on here.
After all the missed backups had caught up, I decided to save the settings in case of further problems. I clicked on the "Save settings to file ..." button, selected the folder and created a filename (.zip file) and pressed save. Got an error dialogue:-
Save Settings to File
[pathname\filename.zip
File not found.
Check the file name and try again.
Well, it would not have found the file name because I was just creating the file. Very puzzling. Long story short, I found that I had previously saved the settings to another folder and with another filename when I originally updated to ATI 2021, so I tried to save the latest settings to that filename. Got another dialogue saying that the file already exists, but gave the option to overwrite - which I did and it worked (apparently). So it seems that you have to have an existing saved-settings file before you can save the latest settings?? I must have been able to save the settings originally. My best guess is that it works OK the first time, then somehow remembers that you have saved it and only lets you save again to the same file. Makes sense I suppose, but (IMO) this is definitely not intuitive to the average user (as I am)!
Anyway, I realize that this update has been long and rambly, so if I can summarize:
1. I don't know why ATI 2021 failed so miserably after upgrading to the latest Windows 10 version.
2. The key to resolve it was in KB article 60915, Method 3 (thanks, Steve, for the pointer).
3. Further pointer that I had to stop Acronis Windows services (thanks again, Steve) before being able to complete Method 3.
4. Needed to disable all Acronis entries in Task Manager | Startup (and re-enable them later).
Incidentally, I didn't have to redo all the settings after the repair install as I think was stated somewhere in the KB - it remembered (or reloaded) the original settings.
Barring any lingering problems when the backups run again tonight, I consider this matter to be closed. Thanks again Steve and Ian for your help.
Cheers,
Pete.