Files shredded on other discs that were not ticked
With a failing C Drive on a PC that is only 14 months old I installed a new drive and with ATI Home 2011 restored the operating system as installed by the PC manufacturer. Stupidly did not get around to doing further back ups after reinstalling all my programmes but didn’t expect a failing drive so soon. Goes to show!
So a week later after hours and hours of Windows updates, reinstalling again the software and settings, I went for Acronis file shredding to be able to return the faulty disc to the PC maker. I was using the new C Drive and being VERY careful to identify the correct drive (J) via Acronis/SMART disc manager I started to shred User files. Every so often it said ‘file in use can’t delete’ – or something similar. For many of the file locations it seems to stop part way through even after leaving it for a while so I gave up in the end thinking it was because the drive was failing.
However I then discovered that the most of User files on my brand new C drive were also deleted and I think also on another drive I kept from my previous PC.
The new C drive is barley functioning now and I will have to do a complete reinstall all over again.
What has happened – I don’t want to use the shredder ever again unless I know what is happening. I don’t think I had to reinstall ATI again on the new drive so does Acronis sit outside the C drive and so when shredding it goes for all the User files on other discs too?
Hi Scott. I was using Windows. Yes I'm aware that drive letters change. Which is why I was soooo careful to make sure I picked correct drive to shred files from. The disc manager (that's not the right name) showed the faulty drive with red (and Windows Smart showed this too before I used Acronis which ties up with SMART anyway I gather) and by the fact that it had an empty partition which I had set up when I got the PC in additon to the the System Reserved and the old C drive showing as J drive I was sure I was on the right one. Indeed some of the User files have gone from this J drive as well.
As I say I seem to think that ATI was already sitting there to use when I set up the new drive last week and so this is why I am suspicious that it has system files elsewhere - motherboard??? Or by its nature does it propogate system files onto other drives for it to work and somehow it just decides to shred User data files!!
I now think that when it was saying it can't shred some user files was actaully because it was shredding the C Drive and not because of the old drive I was trying to shred from was failing.
ATI doesn't have system files in/on the motherboard. I'm pretty sure that somewhere in your operations you have confused hdisks or drives. It's an easy thing to do and lots of us have done it a time or two.
The shredder is basically just a wiper, an overwriter, and it's unlikely that it would operate on the wrong disk unless the file system itself was terribly horribly no good messed up. Your comment about ati being "already sitting there" suggest even further a confusion about hdisks or drives.
I'm not saying it isn't possible that ati did the damage but it's a bit like looking for a zebra when you hear horse hooves. Still it doesn't sound like an irretrievable situation unless you've deleted form both drives or don't have a backup file any more.
Btw, this is one of the main reasons we urge folks not to do clone but do backups instead.
I think I may have an answer - a 'kerchung' moment.
I'm 100% sure I didn't get discs mixed.
But when I got the new PC I kept the old drive with its operating system on it in order to retrieve various files particualry User data by using BIOS to log in and out of each drive when needed. When I first got the new PC with W7 running I installed Acronis as advsied to do a mirror so that I had a clean set up if ever I needed it and it was this that I used now twice to get the new drive running again. With the original disc (C drive failing) ATI would not clone or mirror over the the new drive which was a smaller size but Solid State drive - I assume as for some reason it couldn't mirror back over a different size. So I mirroed it over to another new drive the same size at 1TB and then cloned that over to the SSD and it worked OK. I therefore had 3 drives with OS on it and all with Acronis as it was there in teh very first mirroe back up on the clean PC. Therefore I assume that somehow ATI was being used by default on each disc to shred files. But still bizarre when only instructed to do so on the ticked files on the J drive as it was.
Scott - thanks for your feedback
It's a year later, but I just had exactly the same experience as the OP! Don't know about "mirroring,". But the target drive which I was trying to wipe did have Acronis installed. (It was it's image that I had restored to the new drive, after all, and I was trying to wipe it for return to the OEM, just like the OP.). Using TI Home 11 on Win 7 x 64 .
I pray it will successfully restore the image I made 2 days ago, anticipating just this sort of mishap. In progress now. But this should *never* happen.
EDIT couple days later. Successful restore from an Acronis TI 11 image, and I'm thankful for that. For future searchers, to add to above, yes, I was running Acronis from under Windows (7x64). Shouldn't matter. And yes, I quadruple/pentuple checked that the drive letter I'd checked off in the shredder UI was the intended target - even though my new drive had been restored from an image of the target drive, I had a couple new files on it and so could readily distinguish the two drives - so I too am 100% certain I'd checked off the intended target. Despite this, the wiper erased half my new C partition before I became suspicious and stopped it. While I appreciate the recovery aspects of Acronis, I'll never again trust it for wiping/shredding. Incidentally, CCleaner wiped the intended target, no problem.