Acronis TI 2014 Premium Build 6673(Win 7 sp1 64bit,EUFI,GPT Drive) Hangs at Startup
1. I have an issue where mostly, not always, acronis ti premium (6673) hangs at startup(not responding)(loading, please wait) which will last 4 or more minutes until CDRECORD2.EXE clears itself from Task Manager on a very new z97x system that is very clean not even minor windows alert logs for hours at a time. Besides running Microsoft Security Essentials, ZoneAlarm Pro Firewall, Catalyst and EMET there are no other significant programs running, which the same programs are running just fine with Acronis TI on my other computer.
2. Also, After setting up the Acronis Recovery Manager(F11) at Boot I found that it was hanging at Boot on press F11 for about 20 full seconds before moving on to starting windows. Someone on a previous forum article mentioned to push it down the Boot Order List in Bios Setting. This approach worked and the F11 screen no longer showed up at all!!, which was ok because you could hit F12 to enter Boot Order in Bios to find it and set the bios to boot first from the Acronis F11 boot if you ever need to use it. I understand this as with GPT partitions acronis has to create its own separate boot files within the special FAT32 GPT Boot partition.
Everything seemed fine as I restarted window several times and went on to other matters as I thought the above workaround was acceptable. However, when I brought the system out of sleep about 1.5 days later I encountered my first blue screen for which I wrote down the minidump error codes but did not follow up in that direction.
I quickly did a Safe bood and diskcheck fix which correctly fixed all errors(many errors) according to the winnet report log. Afterwards, I also deactivated the F11 Acronis Recovery Manager and also restarted one of the AMD catalyst Service's and another AMD CCI startup entry, both of which I thought were conflicting with CDRECORD.EXE. So, I don't really know if it was the F11 Recovery Manager or the revised Catalyst Settings that caused the Blue Screen.
The GPT system really is better than a MBR system. MBR would have remained corrupted in my opinion even after a disk check fix. I didn't like or trust that diskcheck got everything in pristine condition so I used an acronis recovery disk(DVD) to restore all partitions and it worked just fine (very stressful not knowing if it will work and no widows image available). My approach was to boot from the UEFI BD/DVD Drive boot option not the legacy entry and everything went well to my surprise because I wasn't sure the UEFI/GPT partition would cooperate, in fact I was mentally prepared to reinstall windows using the MBR/Bios setup instead to make sure Acronis would work properly. However, much to my satisfaction the Restore with Acronis was perfect as you can get. I was a little confused setting up the Recovery because the only partition flags that were listed was that each partition was a Primary partion, nothing about active, boot or anything else. I attributed this to this being a EUFI/GPT disk, am I right?? I decided to just use the default size and location and picked all partions. It sure was stressfull because it didn't look like a MBR setup!
I have not had any blue screens for several days since turning off Acronis Recovery Manager which is ok because I have always preferred to use Bootable Media instead of the F11 option and never from inside Windows OS.
I'm ok with this workaround but I was wondering how have others decided to address this issue ? I'm tempted to try reactivating the F11 Recovery Option just in case my bootable media doesn't work or is lost and because the blue screen could have been caused by the catalyst changes that I previously made but since put back to default settings. What have others decided to do with UEFI/GPT without secure boot partitions ?
Back to question #1 above. I have a 1.4 yrs old Mobile Desktop/Laptop running same TI Build perfectly, which gave me a correctly working system to compare to. I listed the differences between the 2 systems and started to work out the problem.
The new system Differences: 1. UEFI on GPT supporting UEFI first Legacy boot second instead of MBR boot partition. 2. BD-RE burner drive instead of a plain DVD-CD burner drive. 3. Catalyst instead of Nvidia . I soon noticed that my Burner drive was listed as a BD-RE drive instead of a DVD_R drive like on my laptop and my first idea was to switch out the Blu-ray burner (pioneer bdr-208dbk) with an old Plextor px-755sa DVD burner, but I didn't and tried other methods to try and keep acronis (cdrecord2.exe) from hanging up Acronis. Also, when CDRECORD2.exe was hanging and stuck showing itself in Task Manager , the virtual disk service would not work during such a hang when going into Computer Management and clicking on Disk Management. I renamed the cdrecord2.exe file like I read in another forum article and that corrected the problem but that did not satisfy me. I did not like that workaround and put it back to it's normal name.
So, eventually I opened up the case and put the older DVD Burner Drive and disconnected the Blu-ray Burner and it works perfect and super fast when starting acronis and no more Virtual Disk service problem. In fact I noticed that Acronis did not ever call up cdrecord2.exe at all in task manager unless it's so fast that a person can't see the entry. My laptop calls up cdrecord2.exe but it goes away quickly and is consistent the way it behaves. The only difference between the two systems is that the laptop has a very new DVD burner and the Plextor I am using in the New computer was mfg. in 2006(it is a top of the line serial ata burner however). So what is the best explanation for the issues that I brought up and has anyone found better workarounds than what I'm doing>
My Workarounds: 1. use a separate DVD burner all the time and keep the BD-RE Blu-ray burner hooked up and disabled in device manager until I need it. However, I now believe Blu-ray players are just problem childs that are not worth the effort because codecs are always changing and firmware upgrades are constantly needed and not to be found. I will just stick with my PS3 player to watch Blue-ray disks. I have no need to burn Blu-ray plus dealing with the outdated firmwares and content protection is too much trouble. At least Sony keeps their PS3's updated.
2. For now, I intend on leaving the Acronis Recovery Manager not activated unless most readers have found that over a long period of time activating it on a UEFI/GPT disk is stable and potentially useful.
Thanks and please forgive the long thread.
So, at least tell me if any of the information that I posted was correct or helpful or not applicable to anyone.
Yilee,
First, welcome to the Forum. I am not sure that I can help with your problem but my suggestion for possible resolution would be for you to attempt to repair the TI installation. From what I can tell errors with cdrecord2.exe or hangs at start up common cause are corrupt or bad installation of the cdrecord2 program. To attempt a repair just run the TI executable file again as an admin of course. This should produce a menu from which you can choose a Repair option. Hopefully that will straighten things out.
There is also the possibility of a conflict between cdrecord2.exe and another app installed on your computer. Common suspects would be other CD burning software. Anti virus apps can often cause problems as well and so you might have some success if you exclude from scan or identify the cdrecord2.exe as an acceptable app in your anti virus software.
Another workaround is to search for and locate the cdrecord2.exe file and rename it such as cdrecord2.exe.old. This will cause the program not to run and from what I can tell the TI app will run fine without it.
The Acronis Recovery Manager replaces the Windows boot manager with its own and is known to cause various problems and can create difficulty with recovery in some cases so it is not something the MVP's recommend using. It sounds like you probably already know this so the choice is certainly yours to make.
Hopefully someone else will jump in here and add more for you.
Yilee,
First, welcome to the Forum. I am not sure that I can help with your problem but my suggestion for possible resolution would be for you to attempt to repair the TI installation. From what I can tell errors with cdrecord2.exe or hangs at start up common cause are corrupt or bad installation of the cdrecord2 program. To attempt a repair just run the TI executable file again as an admin of course. This should produce a menu from which you can choose a Repair option. Hopefully that will straighten things out.
There is also the possibility of a conflict between cdrecord2.exe and another app installed on your computer. Common suspects would be other CD burning software. Anti virus apps can often cause problems as well and so you might have some success if you exclude from scan or identify the cdrecord2.exe as an acceptable app in your anti virus software.
Another workaround is to search for and locate the cdrecord2.exe file and rename it such as cdrecord2.exe.old. This will cause the program not to run and from what I can tell the TI app will run fine without it.
The Acronis Recovery Manager replaces the Windows boot manager with its own and is known to cause various problems and can create difficulty with recovery in some cases so it is not something the MVP's recommend using. It sounds like you probably already know this so the choice is certainly yours to make.
Hopefully someone else will jump in here and add more for you.
Yilee,
First, welcome to the Forum. I am not sure that I can help with your problem but my suggestion for possible resolution would be for you to attempt to repair the TI installation. From what I can tell errors with cdrecord2.exe or hangs at start up common cause are corrupt or bad installation of the cdrecord2 program. To attempt a repair just run the TI executable file again as an admin of course. This should produce a menu from which you can choose a Repair option. Hopefully that will straighten things out.
There is also the possibility of a conflict between cdrecord2.exe and another app installed on your computer. Common suspects would be other CD burning software. Anti virus apps can often cause problems as well and so you might have some success if you exclude from scan or identify the cdrecord2.exe as an acceptable app in your anti virus software.
Another workaround is to search for and locate the cdrecord2.exe file and rename it such as cdrecord2.exe.old. This will cause the program not to run and from what I can tell the TI app will run fine without it.
The Acronis Recovery Manager replaces the Windows boot manager with its own and is known to cause various problems and can create difficulty with recovery in some cases so it is not something the MVP's recommend using. It sounds like you probably already know this so the choice is certainly yours to make.
Hopefully someone else will jump in here and add more for you.
Thanks for the reply, I won't bother with the Acronis Recovery Manager on my new Tower setup because I realize it's not needed and can potentially cause problems it seems. I have plenty of bootable media, USB Flash and DVD's all the same build, plus in the past I always used the bootable media for a restoration. I only now realized that bootable media made on different computers (same TI build) will work on other computers.
I installed an older Plexor DVD burner on my new tower and it works perfect and it does not call up CDRECORD2.EXE at all, in fact I decided to test it by creating an Acronis Bootable DVD to make sure it worked and it worked just fine and did not call up cdrecord2.exe even during the DVD burn. So I am still wondering what cdrecord2.exe is used for??
What doesn't make sense and bugs me enough to keep trying to find the answer to the HANG problem is that My laptop calls on cdrecord2.exe for a split second before it disappears and does not cause any hanging, and it uses a DVD-RW burner but my new tower will not call up cdrecord2.exe at all when only the old Plextor DVD-RW Burner is hooked up and the BD-RE burner most always hangs. Doesn't make sense!!
Being a little stubborn, I hooked up the Pioneer BD-RE Blu-ray burner in addition to my old Plextor DVD burner and cdrecord2.exe again started hanging Acronis at startup as well as the Virtual Disk Service. So I disabled the BD-RE player in device manager and everything was good again. So I then connected the BD-RE player to a Marvell Sata Port and it again caused the HANG problem.
So there may be one last area concerning a log alert entry ZoneAlarm Pro Firewall OS Firewall concerning Acronis but the log does not indicate anything was blocked but is vague. So, I may uninstall zonealarm then repair acronis and then reinstall zonealarm. I use zonealarm with acronis on my laptop with no problem or any log alert entries. I've know zonealarm pro firewall to get crossed up before with other programs especially if many rules are in place. Usually this kind of problem can be fixed by installing the affected program first and zonealarm second. All just well known and proven diagnostic approaches with such complicated programs.
Also, I have 2 of the Pioneer BD_RE burners in question, both new out of the box and they both cause the HANG problem so it's unlikely they are both bad. My cables are all good. Also, I had already performed a successful repair of Acronis with elevated privlages (I read the repair log, it was successful). So I guess if the zonealarm uninstall/install doesn't work I will probably sell the BD-RE Blu-ray burners for much of nothing on Craigs list.