Lost cursor when using DD10 bootdisk
Hi, since I had problems copying 'C' drive to a USB HDD in DDv9, the good techy folk of Acronis sent me a bootable copy of DD10 which I have been using successfully for about a year to copy in either direction. System is WinXP SP3 and it has been working from and to SATA HDD (320GB). Over the weekend I upgraded the MB from Foxconn to Asus and the processor and now this version of Acronis DD is the only application with fails to pickup the cursor when in boot mode. The mouse lights up when moved but nothing appears on the screen. In all other ways the program appears normally, but of course is useless because I'm not able to select anything. Has anyone any ideas or have come across this problem before?
Regards
rib-rider
Hello,
Gary, thank you very much for your help.
JonTee, let me assist you with the issue. I think Gary is absolutely correct and the most probable reason of the issue is that standard bootable media for Acronis Disk Director 9.0 doesn't have necessary drivers or it detects your hardware incorrectly.
I may suggest you to do the following:
- Boot the computer from Acronis Rescue Media (Full version);
- Hit F11 key after the "Starting Acronis Loader..." message appears and you get to the selection screen of the program;
- After you get the "Linux Kernel Settings" prompt, please add "usbmouse=off" parameter (without quotes) to the end of the Linux kernel command line (so it will be "quiet usbmouse=off");
- Click OK.
With the usbmouse=off parameter Acronis Linux will load a different module to support USB mouse. This should resolve the issue.
However, if the issue still persists, please reply to this thread and I'll provide you with a special version of bootable media.
We are looking forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.
Thank you.
Hi Ilya, Gary,
Sorry I've been unable to respond tied up with other things. My PC uses a USB mouse, I only have a full version of DD9 since I was having problems with that recognizing the USB drive I was sent the DD10 bootable "rescue" disk. So when you say boot the PC from "Acronis Rescue Media (Full version)" I assume you mean the DD10 version that I have. I will try your suggestion this evening with that version and let you know how it goes.
Thanks for your help
JonTee
Hi Ilya,
I did the following each with the USB HDD connected.
Using DD9 rescue disk, at "Starting Acronis Loader" keyed F11 a box with the word "quiet" appeared but the mouse cursor was working, I typed in the USBMouse=off and used the mouse to click ok, the application then continued to the "Full version, safe version, install OS" screen. I selected the full version and received the error message "failed to read sector -653 510 604 of hard disk 1". I cancelled this and attempted to use the safe mode but the application hung when attempting to analyze the disk. I repeated the above but omitted to key the USBMouse=off., but obtained the same results.
I powered down the PC, removed the DD9 recuse disk and inserted the DD10 rescue disk. After the POST, the "Starting Acronis Loader......" did not appear and the PC moved from POST to the Acronis startup screen instantly.
If I pressed F11 before the POST finished it had no effect and the cursor arrived at "boot" after zipping through the first six lines of the header. If I waited until the POST finished and then pressed F11 again the same thing happened. In each case the application continued to initiate and when the "Full version, safe version, install OS" screen appeared the mouse cursor did not appear. When I left the application for a little while, the message "failed to read sector -653 510 604 of hard disk 1" appeared.
Until I changed the MB the DD10 rescue disk functionality worked correctly and left me with a bootable 'c' drive on the USB HDD. Now I don't get to first base.
Regards
JonTee
Hello Ilya, as you can see from my previous post. It is not working correctly. Is there a fix?
Regards
JonTee
JonTee-
The error message you get - "failed to read sector -653 510 604 of hard disk 1" - is quite disturbing. This may indicate a problem with your disk. Have you checked this out?
Hi Gary,
Thanks for your help. There was indeed an error on hard disk 1 which is the USB drive. I ran the partition checker from DD9 within Windows and it corrected the errors. I then rebooted firstly using DD9 boot disk.
No errors showed but booting into the full version I was unable to see the two SATA disks and could only see the USB externall HDD. The cursor worked ok. Then re-booting into safe mode I could see all disks, cursor working ok. Some background - on previous occasions when I tried to copy the 'C' drive to the USB external HDD partition in safe mode, it took a very long time and usually failed. Since when I first found this I'd only just purchased DD9 the people at Acronis provided me with a rescue disk for DD10 which had just arrived on the scene and worked ok until last weekend when I changed the MB.
Again when I booted using the DD10 rescue disk, all the disks and partitions appear but I still can't do anything with the application because the cursor is not present, and I am unable to implement Ilya's suggestion because the version of the DD10 rescue disk doesn't open up in the same way as DD9 or even DD8 used to. So DD10 is currently not working for me because of something that appears to be BIOS or hardware dependent in their coding.
It is beginning to look like Acronis have lost the plot for the Jo Punter consumer. I guess their corporate customers keep 'em busy, but they have to remember that some of those are also Jo Punters when at home!
Gary,
I noticed that there were similar issues highlighted in the sidebar, so since this is the ISO version of the CD I tried a potential fix suggested by MudCrab, which was at the boot line to enter text so that the line becomes
"boot: kernel.dat initrd=ramdisk.dat ramdisk_size=55884 vga=0x317 usbmouse=off quiet_"
The iso then continued to load but still the cursor did not appear, although all the disks were apparent so I'm still at a loss. I've used Acronis successfully for a number of years but first TI failed when I changed to SATA drives and now this. I'm tempted to move to another application.
Cheers
JonTee
JonTee-
It certainly looks like some irresolvable driver issues. Since you have, from what I understand, the full DD9 package but only the DD10 bootable media, you don't have the full DD10 license. If you did, the only other suggestion I would have is to build a BartPE bootable media with DD10, as shown here: http://kb.acronis.com/content/1752
which appears to apply only to DD10 from what I can see. This approach would possibly resolve the driver issues, since Windows drivers are used.
Gary, Thanks for your help, however, it does beg the question that since Acronis Tech support knew that my system was Windows and that it wasn't working with DD9, why a windows based ISO CD wasn't provided anyway, but we are where we are.
Since the backup used to work with DD9 do you know if there is any way that I can do the same thing for the full version for DD9 i.e. introduce a windows based ISO CD to try it.
There is no such thing as a "Windows-based" ISO CD - this will always be a Linux-based system.
Gary Thanks.
Bye Bye Acronis then. I certainly won't be passing on any recommends about their products to my techy colleagues, in fact the opposite.
Cheers.
The only Windows-based bootable media method that I could think would be a BartPE build, but as I pointed out earlier, I don't know how this would be done with DD9.