Problem with True Image 10 on Win XP
Hi all,
My Windows XP (SP3) installation has recently become corrupted, and I'm trying to restore it from a recent Acronis back-up.
Have accessed Acronis True Image 10 Recovery by selecting F11 during the boot sequence; but unfortunately it is mis-recognising the drive-letter assignments.
I have a legacy multi-boot system, with Windows 98 on the C: partition of my system drive, and Windows XP on the E: partition.
I also have two data drives, one with drive letter D: and the other with F: (which contains my Acronis back-ups).
True Image has for some reason swapped the E: and F: drive letters: so it thinks my back-up files are on Drive E:
When I select restore C: and E: to the system drive, it says it's going to swap drive letter E: to F:, which obviously I don't want. That would presumably mean my Windows XP installation would no longer be on the correct drive letter, and nothing would function correctly
How should I proceed?
(N.B. I have a copy of the Acronis back-up files on an external HDD: so one possible solution may be to disconnect the internal F: drive, and use an external HDD drive to source the Acronis back-up files. Hopefully the drive letters would then revert to their correct designations. However that would be a hassle, and disconnecting the F: drive risks bending the pins of the connector, which has happened in the past.)

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Alexander, welcome to these User Forums.
I would recommend downloading the ATI 10.0 Rescue Media .ISO file from your Acronis account and burning this to a CD then booting from this media rather than using the F11 boot option for ASRM.
Both F11 / ASRM and the Boot CD all use a Linux kernel OS when booting to the Acronis recovery application environment, and this will show drive letters differently to how they are shown in Windows XP (or later versions of Windows), so you need to choose very carefully where you recover your backup .tib image to as the first action of recovery is to wipe the destination drive / partition.
If you have the option to disconnect any drives which are not involved in the recovery operation then can often be the safest option to take.
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In reply to Alexander, welcome to these… by truwrikodrorow…

Thanks for the advice.
I don't have any problem recognising which drive needs to be overwritten, as the partition structure makes that very obvious. My worry is will my system drive letter change from E: to F: within Windows once I've done the recovery?
I already have the ISO on a rescue CD, and I did consider using that option.
Problem is its incredibly slow to load for some reason: so I haven't tried it yet, as I gave up waiting for Acronis to initialise.
I'm uncertain if it will make any difference to the drive letter assignments anyway: so I'm not sure it will help.
Think I can disable the D: drive in BIOS without physically disconnecting it: so will try that option first.
(N.B. It did occur to me that I could ignore the warning of the drive letter reassignment from E: to F:, and do the F11 recovery without disabling any drives. Since I suspect the drive letter reassignment would only occur within Acronis ASRM, and Windows would not reassign drive letters. However I don't want to take the risk, just in case I'm wrong!)
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The drive letters should be correct when you boot back into Windows provided all the original drives are connected and none others. The change in drive letters is purely down to the Linux mapping of these which is performed differently to Windows, so given you know which are which, there should be no real issues here.
The speed of booting the ATI Rescue CD may depend on the amount of memory in your WinXP computer as well as CPU speed / capability etc. F11 should be faster because of the higher transfer rates from booting off the hard drive but would be unavailable in a drive replacement scenario.
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Tried physically disconnecting the data drives, and disabling them in BIOS; but nothing worked. I couldn't get the drive letters in the right order within F11 ASRM, or when initialising Acronis from the rescue CD.
So I decided to risk restoring the system drive anyway, and hope the drive letters would be assigned correctly once I booted into Windows (as you suggested).
Turned out they were OK; but now I have another issue.
Seems the True Image background process is causing Windows to crash with a blue screen of death as it initialises.
i terminated the process and removed it from Start Up: so now Windows can start normally.
Just wondered what effect this will have on Acronis, to not have that process running in the background?
The system crash happens when True Image maxes out the CPU to 99%: so I'm guessing my processor may be wearing out and needs replacing.
Other CPU intensive activity also causes the system to freeze.
Think it's unlikely to be a motherboard fault.
I bought some new RAM last week, and have tested it with Memtest86: so am pretty confident the memory DIMM is not the culprit.
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Good to hear that the restore was OK and drive letters are as they should be.
What exact Acronis background process is causing the BSOD on WinXP?
The earliest list of ATI processes I can find is for ATI 2011 which came later than your TI 10.0 but may give you an idea of the purpose of the one you are seeing an issue with?
KB 10471: Acronis True Image Home 2011: Processes in Windows Task Manager
The other suggestion would be to try doing a Repair install of TI 10.0 by downloading the full installer from your Acronis account, then installing (as administrator) over the top of the current software, which should repair any issues with DLL's and registry entries etc.
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I believe it was True Image Monitor.
i doubt the issue is due to a corrupt dll or registry entry, since I'm having similar problems with "Add Remove Program" in Control Panel. It causes Windows to crash whilst attempting to list all of the installed programs.
Also ACDSee and Digiguide cause Windows to crash when performing CPU intensive tasks.
Is there any free software you know of that can test my CPU to confirm the problem lies there?
I do have a spare CPU; but they're very tricky to fit.
The only other possibility I can think of would be a corruption within the operating system.
I tried running sfc /scannow to repair any faults within Windows; but it too caused the system to freeze halfway through.
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Alexander, given the age of your computer, I would suggest downloading Hiren's Boot CD and trying the Mini-XP boot environment from there, which will also give you tools you can try using to test your CPU and other components. You will need to download the ISO image for the old version of Hiren's otherwise you will be taken to a new 64-bit WinPE version based on Windows 10.
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