Acronis 2013 with Windows 8 and VS2012 hangs desktop
I ran into a problem on my Windows 8 64-bit system. When I installed Visual Studio 2012, my computer started exhibiting an odd behavior. Whenever I would start it up, Explorer would freeze part way through loading the taskbar. I backed out Visual Studio 2012 and the problem persisted.
It wasn't till I found this in my Event log that I got the nugget needed to fix the problem.
Faulting application name: DllHost.exe, version: 6.2.9200.16384, time stamp: 0x5010888a
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.2.9200.16420, time stamp: 0x505aaa82
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x000da94f
Faulting process id: 0x16ec
Faulting application start time: 0x01cdea7dd327801b
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\DllHost.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 10fa321e-5671-11e2-be90-083e8ee190ca
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:
Searching for "Faulting application path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\DllHost.exe" found a thread in which many people were piling on and the thing that all had in common was running Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012, and Acronis 2013. Uninstalling VS2012 didn't fix the problem. But it appears that uninstalling Acronis does fix the problem.
Prior to uninstalling Acronis 2013, I couldn't get my desktop to start without booting into safe mode and then rebooting into normal mode. But even when things started up I would run into issues of explorer freezing when I right clicked on programs or opened a folder and it couldn't display the icons.
But after uninstalling Acronis, all of the errors in the event log went away and I haven't had a problem since.
The sad thing is that the only part of Acronis I really want is the F11 at boot time which lets me do a bare metal backup or a restore. I wish there were a way to install Acronis so that I just get the backup/restore capability and F11 without all of the other tools or features.
Scott
Thanks for the quick reply. I did try that, but it is a Lenovo X1 Carbon and when I boot off the recovery CD, Acronis faults on with an error accessing the display.
So, my restore plan (which I have executed 3 times while trying to figure out what driver was causing these freezes) has been to do a fresh install of Win 8, install Acronis, then boot from Windows and complete the disk image restore. It is a bit convoluted but it works.
I can't figure out how to capture the data from the CD boot since everything is just text on a black screen during boot and I can't capture a screenshot.
Thanks for the quick response!
Scott
William:
Have you tried setting a different video mode when booting from the Rescue Media? Try the vga=ask startup parameter. See page 170 of the TI 2013 User Guide.
Another alternative is to create a Windows PE version of the recovery media which is more likely to contain the proper video driver for your hardware than the standard Acronis Rescue Media, which is Linux-based. Linux driver support often lags behind Windows driver support. See page 175 of the User Guide. Note that this option (which many of us prefer) requires the Acronis Plus Pack.
You can also contact Acronis Support to see if they can fix the rescue media build to support your Lenovo X1 Carbon hardware.
I didn't realize that the Plus pack had that. I have always bought the plus pack just because I figured it gave me something but I never used it or looked through it. The only thing I have used Acronis for is bare metal backup and either bare metal restore or individual file restore. Having it installed in the Windows 8 environment was nice because I could restore individual files from backups at any time.
I will reinstall Acronis, build a Windows PE boot disk with the Plus pack, and see how that goes.
That at least lets me still do regular backups.
Thanks!
Scott
Just a warning, the F11 option may not (read probably not) work properly on a native Windows 8 machine. If you installed W8 over the top of W7 or Vista then this does not apply, but the Linux used to boot the ASRM doesn't work with Secure Boot which all native OEM machines must have in order to boot Windows 8.
Secure Boot has to be disabled in the BIOS alongside possibly switching the UEFI to Legacy mode, which then allows Linux to boot the PC, once a recovery has been run, these entries need to be switched back in order for W8 to run.
As Secure Boot is a Microsoft security feature for OEM copies of W8, it will probably be some time before the general Linux community can get their hands on SB aware booting. There are some workarounds to allow Linux to boot these systems. The Linux foundation appears to be opting for a solution whereby they come up with a new bootloader which has an embedded security key sanctified by Microsoft, which then boots another loader to boot the Linux loader! Hopefully that will work more quickly than th etime it took to type that.
Whether Microsoft will charge someone somewhere in the Linux distribution community for that service I don't now.
An interesting reference article - PC World