Try & Decide fails to restart Windows

Welcome Victor Z,
Are you using an SSD drive? I initially thought about partition offset, but you can start successfully if changes are discarded, so that's a no.

How big is the SZ you have created on the system disk?

How about a posting a System Report for our review.

Shadowsports,

Thanks for the prompt response. First time I've had a problem with ATIH. Great program that I've relied on and trusted for years, but this problem really spun my head around!

In reply to your queries ... Yes, the system drive is an SSD. I've never used one before but since this is a new MB and a speedier setup, I figured I'd go whole hog. Drive is a Samsung 830 - 120Gb capacity. I initially tried it (T&D) without doing anything special, i.e., just run an gun. When it failed to restart, I though perhaps the default of using a portion of the system drive as the repository might be at fault so tried setting up the ASZ, which in reply to your 2nd question, is 50Gb set up on one of the other plain jane SATA platters.

BTW, I notice that we share similar MB's, CPU's and GPU's ... P8Z68 MB, i7-2600k, GTX550Ti ... I've only got 8Gb in the box at present and different disks, but substantially the same.

I'll post a system report if necessary to troubleshoot but insofar as I'm not sure how much personal data is included, I'll pass on that for the moment until proven essential.

Thanks again and looking forward to a quick resolution to this weirdness. Given your initial query re. SSD ... is there a problem with that?

Regards,
Victor

Bump ... Any suggestions ??

Hi Victor,
Regarding use of SSD, in general no there is not. The partition offset can become a factor when restoring partitions to an SSD. This has to do with alignment. When start up and recovery is activated, the MBR of a disk is modified and boot failure is possible in a small number of cases. SSD's can be less forgiving, but again this is rare.

Other possible issue can occur if T&D is used in conjuction with a multi-boot environment. Didn't get the sense this was an issue here.

The space you allocated for the ASZ is more than enough. When I specified "on the system disk" this was done so I could determine where you were attempting to create the SZ. An external disk (for example) will not work.

Without the report, it will be difficult for us to speculate why T&D fails to start. You can review the logs yourself if you wish, but we are sort of "blind" as to what might be happening there.

The z68 platform has exceeded my expectations. The Corsair SSD's in RAID 0 are fabulous. The vid card is EVGA. It also performs well!

Shadowsports,

Righto, sysreport attached. I've tried uninstalling, scrubbing the installation with the uninstallation tool, updating BIOS, reinstalling ATIH 2012, no change. Still doesn't reboot through T&D, just loops as noted above and will only reboot upon discarding changes. Hope the report sheds some light on things here. At present, this system is pretty clean - installed software wise - the attached disks do have a bunch of stuff on them from the old system, but T&D worked fine there and I can't imagine that's the problem. If desired, I could try it with only the SSD (system disk) attached.

Thanks again,
Victor

Grabbed the report. Having allergy issues tonight. Will look at the report asap. Hope others here can also take a look.

Victor... Still looking at the logs. Have a few suggestions/question.

1. Non Stop back up cannot be in use at the same time as T&D. Enabling T&D temporarily disables NSB, but please ensure it's not running before testing.

2. If Start Up and Recovery Manager is enabled, try disabling it, reboot, then enable T&D and attempt a reboot and select continue using T&D.

3. You should be able to specify that T&D use free space on C:\ or that the SZ be used as the sandbox for T&D. I think you've tried both, yes?

4. As a last resort. Please Open Programs & Features in Win7. Select ATIH2012 and press the change button. Perform a repair install of 2012, reboot and retest.

Thanks

Dunno where you are, but 'round here we're about a month early for flowering and lots of pollen activity collapsed into early spring. Gesundheit!

Insofar as there are/should be three services - Nonstop Backup, Scheduler2 and Sync - then yes, they're all there, running. I'm usually quite good at puzzles but this one is out of my wheelhouse.

Thanks for the aid. I'll keep an eye out for more info. For know, frequent incrementals serves as a stopgap; clumsy, but effective.

VZ

Shadow,

1) I've never used non-stop backup and am not using it now. I looked at the options/setup for it, the documents folder was selected (by default? I sure didn't set it up) but as there was a "Start" button, I'm assuming it wasn't running. How would I tell? The (default) filename for the backup doesn't exisit on the target drive, so I suppose that's proof enough.

2) Start Up & Recovery Manager is not enabled.

3) Yes, I've tried all variations ... sending T&D to another drive, to a (newly established) SZ, as well as to the C:\ partition.

4) I'll try yet again and let you know.

Thanks,
VZ

Victor,
The repair install suggestions is sort of a reach. It was found to be a solution in a previous version of ATIH when an upgrade install from vista to win7 was performed. While that is not indicated here, I suggested it to ensure the integrity of your current install. I cannot see anything wrong with the disk configuration. There are two entries in your logs for T&D. I'm going to review your event logs in a little bit, looking for correlation between timestamps and events errors if they exist.

PS. I'm in Northern California, Bay Area. Lots of grass and flowers here. We've had some rain, then super hot weather. Everything is blooming and so are my allergies :)

Shadow,

Much obliged for your efforts. Given that this was a clean OS install, no upgrade issues here. I'm sorely tempted to go back to 2011 version for grins and to see if there's a problem THERE too - that might be informative - but will wait to hear if you find anything. Not sure what I'm giving up if I downgrade ... I didn't feel I was missing features before. Was the ability to reboot and continue T&D an addition in 2011 or before? I don't recall now, but DO seem to think that it was a new feature at some point, i.e. that it wasn't allowed before; you had to either discard or accept in order to reboot.

VZ

Did you try the repair install, reboot and test? Couldn't tell by your post. (Suggestion is optional)

T&D existed in previous versions prior to 2011. They had the ability to accept or discard as well.

No, I never tried a repair install ... but as I've just restored a previous backup and am about to reinstall it again, I'll give it a shot if it continues to misbehave. Of course, if it DOES work, I'll let you know as well and we can all scratch our heads over it.

I'm aware T&D existed in prior versions, I just had the feeling that in it's initial incarnations, there wasn't the opportunity to reboot and continue in "try" mode ... i.e, that you were not given a choice to continue in T&D, rather, the only choices were to make the changes permanent or discard them if you had to reboot. Perhaps I'm not explaining the distinction clearly, or (more likely) my memory fails and all three options were always available.

VZ

Ok, here's another data point. Installed ATIH 2011 and the end up with the same behavior; Rebooting while T&D is running results in a failed restart with a loop back to the decision screen. Only option that moves past this point is to discard changes. :(

So ... it's not a 2011/2012 version thing, it must be the system, either hardware, software, somewhere, somehow.

Right now, no ATIH version is installed. To be complete, I'll try reinstalling 2012, watch T&D fail, then do a repair to see if that has any effect. I'm not optimistic about the results, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

VZ

Okay, it's been a couple weeks since there's been any response. I'm patient ... but I feel neglected. Just because I'm not shouting doesn't mean my problem has gone away. Do you -- or anyone for that matter -- have a clue as to what is going on with T&D and why it fails on restart? I've tried recommended items but got no further responses after indicating that the actions were made. If you're throwing in the towel, at least let me know.

Thanks in advance
Victor

Hi Victor,
Didn't mean for it to appear as ignoring you. Participation here is voluntary and work schedules sometimes conflict. Do you have the Acronis Start Up and Recovery Manager activated on this machine? If so, please disable and reboot. Now restart T&D and see if you are able to continue with T & D across a machine restart. 

Working on getting the forum team more involved with this.

Shadow,

No worries. I'm aware that this is a labor of love/interest for the problem solvers. It doesn't put food on the table and I fully understand that the real world intrudes and, as it should, takes precedence. I hope my tone wasn't overly strident; I apologize if it came across so. I appreciate your quick reply and your suggestion re. getting some other minds bent to the problem.

As to Start Up and Recovery Manager ... It is not now, nor has it ever been turned on. At least, that's what I can assume by the fact that if I select it under the tools tab, a description of the function appears along with a button that says "Activate". I take that to mean it's currently DE-activated. Only the basic program functions are active and in use. Heck, I don't even have a scheduled backup set up on this box yet (though I did on my previous machine, I just haven't gotten 'round to it yet.) FYI, I don't have non-stop backup activated either.

Thanks for your continuing assistance.
Victor

 Hello all,

Thank you for taking time to contact us.

Victor Z,

The issue is hardware-specific, and we should find the exact reason of the malfunction.

1) Does the issue occur without installing the programs that require the reboot? If you are unable to reproduce the issue without these programs, please let us know the titles of the programs.

2) Could you please unplug all external devices and try to reproduce the issue? Please let us know the results.

We are awaiting for your response. 

Thank you.

PS. Shadowsports, thank you very much for your help.  

Hello all,

Victor,

I am sending a file to you via Private messages, please replace the old file with the new one and provide us with the outputs available at your screen.

This will help to localize the issue.

We are awaiting for your response. 

Thank you.

OIeg,

Thank you for your response. Just back online after being away for a few days. Additional info in PM response.

Many thanks,
Victor