Can installation of A TI Home 2009 cause HDD failure?
I have Acronis True Image Home 2009. Don't know the version; not sure where to find it. I took my Dell 6000D laptop in to have the HD rebuilt (place I purchased it from). I have had this system for about 5 years with no problems. Got it back with all 3 partitions: hibernate, Media Direct, and Windows XP SP3. Immediately installed ATIH and did a backup. Then installed Palm Pilot. Did a complete image backup of all 3 partitions. Walked away for a while. Came back to find the system locked up. After investigating, I found that the system would randomly have a HDD failure and would not boot when F1 pressed. Shutting down and waiting a bit, then restarting, would recover on all but 1 occasion. So I took it back to the shop. They looked it over and said that there is no hardware problem, but something that I installed had corrupted some of the partition info. They fixed that, and I'll pick up the laptop tomorrow.
So can installing ATIH2009 cause this problem, or is it likely that I'll continue to have real hardware failures? Or will running ATIH2009 corrupt the partitions again?
Thanks,
Rich
I think this kind of prob would have been reported before. If the prob is intermittent, it's ;more likely a hardare issue.
If it's a consistent prob, then it is likely caused by a bad hardware driver or by a conflict between two or more hardware drivers.
If generally you tend to have driver problems, then it's a good idea to do your installs/uninstalls after using msconfig to remove all non-microsoft srvices and all start progrs from PC startup. Then boot then do the install/uninstall. This can avoid a lot of probs and only adds a fewminutes (whatever your bootup time is) to the install/uninstall.
Since this is a new HD installation, I'd also consider the drive connections, which can lead to the kind of probs you describe -- although it might be the last thing the shop that installed the drive would admit too ;) . But reseating the drive can help if this is the case.
Thanks for all the comments. I returned the laptop to the shop, and they said that the problem was a few corrupt directory entries, which they fixed. When I got it back, I turned it on and let it run for several hours. No problems. I removed what software I had installed (3 apps) including Acronis. I then downloaded the latest version of 2009 from the web and installed that. Checked for disk errors. None reported. I rebooted and ran Acronis. It aborted with a "Sorry, fatal error" message. Makes me wonder if Acronis is doing something that causes problems...I rebooted and ran it again. No problems. I then did [what I hope is] an image backup of all 3 partitions, about 6GB at this point. (I assume that Acronis knows about empty space and doesn't back it up.) I am now installing software and doing image backups, and seems to be going well.
I was surprised when I installed the firewall and one of the first things it did was ask me if Acronis could do something with raw disk files. Acronis wasn't running, so I didn't expect any resident issues. If this continues to be the case, I'll find a way to disable Acronis during regular operations, just as I do with other products whose developers seem to think that I want a host of processes running all the time that I am not using.
Thanks for the hint about the Alt key, too!
~R~