Workaround for Won't Mount Image -- Hang when Assigning letters to partitions...

Applies to ATI on Windows XP SP3 and possibly Vista too.

It has been months since I bothered to use the Mount Image utility in ATI. I simply would backup my hard disk to an external hard disk and then verify the backup as being a good one. Last week I tried to mount my most recent backup image since my Firefox bookmarks were missing some links. Alas, I ran into the problem of the popup which says "Assigning letters to partitions..." hanging since my XP installation now is SP3. I have tried every workaround and Acronis suggestion, but I discovered that the problem isn't Acronis's fault but instead is Microsoft's fault. You see, Microsoft decided to enable Autoplay by default in SP3 and disabling Autoplay in SP3 does NOT resolve the problem. Thanks Microsoft!

The workaround:

When using Mount Image, be sure to check to box which says "Mount the partitions in read-write mode" and the backup image will mount successfully in 30 seconds or less, depending on the speed of your computer.

Side effects of this workaround:

Since the backup was mounted in read-write mode, new small TIB files will be created since the OS and any anti-virus and anti-malware software now has the ability to "write" new information to what they think is a new hard disk. Don't worry, the original TIB files are not modified in any way. Instead, all "changes" are being automatically saved by ATI as new TIB files. When you unmount the image ("Unmount image"), simply delete the newly created additional TIB files and optionally delete the "Modified backup" entries in the ATI logs, leaving just the log for the actual successfully completed backup.

How did I figure out that the above is the only workaround?

I did four days of testing, thats how!

-- First, I tried disabling the Distributed Link Tracking Client service? The release of XP SP3 caused this problem to surface, but disabling this service does not resolve the issue.

-- Next, I tried making sure that both Autorun and Autoplay were fully disabled (even though this doesn't kill XP's core driver which conflicts with ATI and other programs which hook into the OS at a very low level. Even though killing Autorun and Autoplay didn't resolve the problem, everyone using XP SP3 should read and follow the steps outlined in the following two articles since this is a security issue. Read the first article, do those changes, then read the second article and do those changes -- unless you like the risk of your computer being infected with Confiker or similar types of malware which utilize the same method of Autorun exploit:

http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA09-020A.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967715

-- Finally, digging around here on the forums I came across the following thread which was related to computers which have both ATI and Spyware Doctor installed. The solution in this article is the only solution so far which I have found that allows you to successfully mount a backup image if you are using XP SP3:

http://kb.acronis.com/content/4798

Well, there you have it! I hope this helps ATI users and that this post becomes a sticky. :-)