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External Drive "Already Locked"

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I am having what appears to be a similar problem to others posted on the ATI 2021 subforum. Since installing ATI 2021, when starting a back up to my WD My Book external drive I get an error "Already locked". I opened a case on the issue and eventually was directed to run chkdsl and SFC scan on the WD drive. I did that and found a few files that were repaired. It worked for a few days and then it is back to the "Already locked" error. 

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Paul, welcome to these public User Forums.

I have not seen any reported problems for the particular scenario you are describing here, i.e. that your external WD My Book drive is being locked and preventing ATI from making a backup to it!

The known issue, which I am told that the Acronis engineers have been able to reproduce, is that external drives cannot be ejected since ATI 2021 was installed.

The first check point here would be to ensure that you only have one active security application on your computer, i.e. are only using ATI 2021 Protection or else are using a third-party security / antivirus suite, not having both active or competing for resources etc.

I would recommend contacting the person dealing with your support case at Acronis to let them know that the issue has returned after a short period and that the issue is therefore not resolved!

Paul,

Do you have a password set on this external drive?  Is the drive an Essential model?  

Some owners of the Essential model report this locked condition.  

 

An update for owners of WD external drives which report "Already locked".

This error has a long history on WD external drives.  It seems that these drives having software included/bundled with them have issue when the Discovery app included in the bundle is in use/installed.  For some unknown reason this app marks the drive as read only which then produces the error.

This is a known bug so I would suggest that if you use this app you should update it to the latest version dated 8/12/2020. 

You can find release notes for this app HERE

You can find the download for the app HERE

If you DO NOT use this app then I recommend that you check the attributes assigned to the drive for a read only flag set.  To do this you must use the MS Diskpart utility. 

  1. Open an admin command prompt
  2. Type diskpart and wait for the utility to load
  3. Once loaded type list disk
  4. Locate your external disk then type select disk # where # is the disk number shown for your disk
  5. Once disk is selected type detail disk
  6. In the results look for Current Read-only State
  7. The read-only state should be set to No
  8. If the state is set to Yes type attributes disk clear read-only

Your disk should now be unlocked

Interesting. I use a WD My passport 4TB drive for my laptop backups. I never installed the software so have never seen this problem. The software is on the drive and is dated from 2018.

Thomas,

Yes, if you have never used the software you are likely to be unaffected by this.  If you are then there are other factors at play.  I note that users reporting this problem here are all using WD drives.  

I believe a common cause of this problem is the practice by some of not properly ejecting an external USB drive.  Doing so can cause a myriad of problems.

Steve: I only run one security program - ESET.

Enchantech: I have no password on the WD drive. I never used Discovery but I uninstalled it anyway on 9./30. I checked the drive attributes and it is set to "Read Only - No".

After all that I ran a manual backup on 9/30 which succeeded. However, today, 10/1 it failed again at the scheduled time with the error "already locked".

To my knowledge I've never ejected this WD drive for any reason. Can ejecting another USB drive improperly affect this drive? I'm always very careful of that but the only related item I can think of is: whenever I open this computer I get a dialogue box saying to insert a disk in Drive F, however Drive F does not exist. If that is related, do you know what I should do?

 

Paul,

Your drive F is what some call a phantom drive and it can be attributed to an improperly detached drive such as a USB thumb or external drive. 

You should be able to remove this phantom drive using the Windows diskpart utility run from an admin command prompt.

The following commands should be issued to remove the phantom drive:

  1. At the admin command prompt type diskpart
  2. once diskpart loads type list volume.  This will list all volumes of the PC and all drive letters assigned.  Locate this phantom drive F and make note of the volume number.
  3. Now at the prompt type select volume x where x is the volume number you noted in step 2 above.  This will select the volume associated with the drive letter F.
  4. Now at the prompt type remove letter=F.  This will remove the volume and drive letter F
  5. Type list volume to confirm that drive F is no longer shown.

 

Paul McGinley wrote:
After all that I ran a manual backup on 9/30 which succeeded. However, today, 10/1 it failed again at the scheduled time with the error "already locked".

Here is a question for which I do not have an answer. 

When running a backup task manually and it works, but then fails when running on schedule, is there a difference in the user for the process such that it could be behind the failures?

Bruno C: One manual backup succeeded. The next day a scheduled one failed. Then I tried several manual ones and they all failed as well. At this point, for me anyway, neither one works now. They all say "already locked".

I have sent log files, screen shots, system reports, etc. to the person handling this case (several times actually) and am waiting for them to find a solution before I cancel my subscription and move to someone else's software. I've been fighting this since July on my desktop.

I also had a problem with my laptop backup. I was getting an error "the specified file is not found". That took a month and bringing in a supervisor before that was solved. 

Not at all happy !!!!

I had several days of failures that said "already locked". Then someone noted that the update had fixed that issue. So, on 10/9 I installed the update of 2021. On 10/10 and again today on 10/11 it now fails and says "unknown source".

I'm getting nowhere.

Paul

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Hi Paul

My problem is similar. TrueImage 2020 was working fine until mid August. I got the message "Already locked" when I did a full backup of the Windows disk.

Steps taken:

1) End of Aug, Support told me to replace the Windows disk, it had errors.

2) 19Sep, a backup was successfully completed

3) 7Oct, replace Window disk and restore from backup successfully. Backup still did not work.

Support told me to follow the steps in https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance… 

Backup still did not work.

4) 9Oct, upgrade TrueImage to 2021. Backup still did not work

5) 15Oct(today), Support found that when an OEM partition of Lenovo was included in the backup, backup would fail with error message "Already locked". When this partition was not included (just C: and D:), backup would work.

At this point, I got hand ball-ed by Support to Lenovo on a 10 year old laptop. Seriously?

 

 

 

 

After many days of failure and an error of "Unknown Status" I had one yesterday that said "Already locked" again. Today, out of the blue it succeeded.

I'm waiting to hear from support...STILL

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Posts: 250
Comments: 7092

Paul McGinley wrote:

After many days of failure and an error of "Unknown Status" I had one yesterday that said "Already locked" again. Today, out of the blue it succeeded.

I'm waiting to hear from support...STILL

Hello Paul,

I see that your support ticket is already closed. Was the issue completely resolved? Would you mind sharing the solution here? Thank you!

Question to users posting to this thread:

Have you at any time activated Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (ASRM) on your computer?

This includes doing so in previous versions of True Image all the way back to your first use of the product.

If your answer to the above question is yes, have you upgraded True Image over the years by simply running the installer for each version upgrade to the at the time of upgrade most current version of the product.  In other words you have never uninstalled a version and then installed the product anew?

Thank you for your participation.