No E:\ Drive to back up in Acronis
My Win 7 system has four internal NTFS disks, C: K: E: and F:
Acronis is happy to identify C: K: and F: and will even list the external SATA drive (J:) but it will have nothing whatsoever to do with E: and does not even recognise it (it shows up fine in Win 7 disk manager). After much head scratching I suspect it is because Acronis thinks it is an optical drive (E: used to be reserved for the first optical drive) and that's why it won't list it as a drive for backing up. In retrospect, the choice of E: for a hard disk wasn't a particularly smart move but there you go.
The easy answer I suspect is to simply re-assign a new drive letter and wouldn't life be simple if it were not for the fact that the E: drive - in this case - holds all the user account profiles (of which there are 4 plus the admin account). Re-assigning all those to a new drive together with the attendant registry hacks is not something I relish. If I change the drive letter, all the account settings and software settings will go AWOL and it will take an age to fix.
So, in short, is there a way to 'force' Acronis to recognise an E: drive as a hard disk or am I stuffed on that front. Any suggestions on solving this one welcome, I have tried this on ATI 2010 and 2011 and both fail to recognise the drive.
Thanks
Andy
Nothings special I can see about this drive, used to be part of a RAID 0 array with the F: drive but now reformatted to a basic NTFS with the data restored. Screen cap from Disk Manager below - anything leap out at you? Not tried booting from the ATI CD - I'll try that but ideally I need it to work from within Windows.
Ah - what happened to the screencap I pasted in?? Try again - had to add as an attachment.
It's possible there may be some "RAID" remnants on the drive causing problems. Do you know if the drive was "cleaned" or wiped before it was switched back to normal use?
Windows DISKPART could be used to clean it. Copy off any data first (you can copy it back afterwards) since it will be lost. If you do this, make sure to select the correct drive to clean. Instructions are the same as when cleaning a flash drive.
The TI CD check was just to find out if TI could see the drive from the Linux version. This could help determine if the problem is from TI or Windows.
I'm pretty sure the drive is clean as I reformatted it before re-partitioning as a basic drive (full format not the quick variety) but I didn't wipe it as such. Odd that the other three are all ex-RAID 0 drives and they are working fine. Thanks for the suggestion but I am not sure I want to move the data off and re-partition it because if it goes wrong I am left rebuilding four user accounts and probably re-installing a shed load of apps as well.
If Acronis won't read it I'll just have to find a backup solution that will. Thanks again for your responses.
If you create the Acronis System Report and post it or submit it to Acronis, they may be able to tell you what the problem is.
I don't know for sure the problem is caused by any RAID 0 configuration data. However, similar things have happened and TI does not always look at a drive the same way Windows does.
If you boot to the TI CD and TI sees the drive normally then you can figure the problem is in Windows or with the TI drivers in Windows. It's an easy test to run.
I have now booted using the Acronis CD which finds three drives it labels as C: D: and E: but on checking the contents of these - they are the drives labelled as C: K: and F: in Windows - the Windows 'E:' drive is still missing. Not sure if this helps - it suggests to me that it isn't a Windows error.
Correct. It's more likely a TI detection problem. TI probably "sees" the drive just fine, but is ignoring it for some reason.
What type of RAID was used on the drive (NVidia, Intel, etc.)?
Does the drive show up in TI for a file-based backup?
Do you also have DD? If so, what does it show?
Intel Matrix Manager from the BIOS - twin RAID 0 arrays.
Drive doesn't show anywhere in TI
DD?? not sure what you mean by this - can you clarify
Andy
DD = Disk Director (the Acronis partitioning program).
Ah I see - no I don't have that.
This thread seems to have stalled - I still have the issue however. On further investigation I am wondering if it is because I have the user profiles located on the E:\ drive and not on the same disk as C:\Windows (this is because the two smaller disks are only really big enough to store the OS and the Programs on them - I wanted all the data on the bigger drives. I have run the Acronis driver update (makes no difference) and also I have tried re-assigning a different drive letter (D:) which also makes no difference. TIH 2011 will allow me to specify the E: disk as a target drive (for backups to be stored on) but it doesn't show as selectable for backup either in disk (partition or full) or file manager mode :-?
I have no idea how to fix this but at present I am relying on Windows backup which is something I would prefer not to do.
Andy
Andyb01, it looks like all your partitions are active. Maybe not a big deal but it is weird.
If you have your Win 7 installation DVD, boot on it, choose install, repair, command prompt
- DISKPART
- LIST DISK
- SELECT DISK 1
- LIST PARTITION
- SELECT PARTITION (choose the number of partition E)
- INACTIVE
- SELECT DISK ...
Repeat for the other partitions except the one on disk 0
All the Active partitions are on separate drives so it shouldn't be a problem.
Was a System Report ever created and submitted to Acronis? If so, what was the response?
Agree about the active partition issue - they are all on separate disks. My free support with Acronis expired ages ago but I have now generated a report - will ping that in now?
So much for the support route:
"Andrew, we will certainly assist you in resolving this issue for you. However, from your account details, I can see that the support program for Acronis True Image Home 2011 is expired. We only provide free support for the first 30 days through Chat and Email. So, I would request you to purchase Pay Per Incident support program, that is an expanded program that makes Customer entitled for support, for a single incident from one of Acronis dedicated support professionals."
They can shove their extended pay per incident support - I have forked out quite enough already thanks! In the absence of any official help can I just express my thanks again to those who have tried to assist me with this through the forum.
Andy
Andyb01,
Did you update the intel storage manager to the latest version? We have seen users who had disk issues with ATI and older version of it?
Is there a possibility you could move your data to another disk, break the array, clean the disks and rebuild? In some cases, some disks had some leftovers that ATI was seeing but not windows.
If you want to, send me the System Report via PM and I'll take a look at it. If you don't want to send it all, at least the disks.txt file and the msinfo.nfo file.
Cheers - see PM. I had a look at it but couldn't spot anything obvious.
Pat L - I am no longer using RAID so don't think updating the storage manager will make any difference. I have already broken the array and am now using four basic NTFS disks
Andy
I thought I would post to say that this issue is now resolved. I created an Administator profile on my system disk and from there I manually copied off all the data (including the user profiles) on to an external backup drive. Still logged in as Admin I was able to force a re-format of the E: drive (deleting all the backed up data in the process) and then re-start Windows Disk Manager to initialise and add a single simple partition on the re-formatted drive. I then manually restored all the data after checking that Acronis now sees the drive fine. I didn't format the drive any differently to the way I had done previously but I guess there was a glitch in there somewhere.
Thanks for all the help trying to solve this. I would have done this sooner but could not figure out how to preserve the user settings and still be able to log on without screwing the machine after deleting the profiles and reformatting the disk. Setting up the Admin account on the default system drive was the key to it.
Andy