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Author Topic: Advice on fixing a boot problem with XP Pro  (Read 5145 times)

cranioscopical

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Advice on fixing a boot problem with XP Pro
« on: July 07, 2008, 09:16 PM »
The problem:

My wife's machine had Acronis True Image Home 10 on it.
I didn't like it and uninstalled it (it seemed only to cover the first HD, didn't want to talk to the second HD)
Now a reboot gets me
"Acronis Loader fatal error"

If I then hit enter, we roll on merrily into XP

Questions:

Can I get rid of this Acronis hang-over?

TIA

off topic
On one occasion I put TIA at the end of a message to my ISP, the only satellite provider available to me, sadly.
The reply that came back began with
Dear TIA...
                                                             
Their tech support is about what you'd expect from that  :)


[Edit To answer myself, I found an Acronis .iso that does exactly what I need]

The solution is here, in case it could ever help anyone else.
Please use the following ISO image to create a special CD:
here
Once the CD is written, boot the computer from it and confirm that you want to fix the master boot record.
« Last Edit: July 07, 2008, 10:41 PM by cranioscopical »

jgpaiva

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Re: Advice on fixing a boot problem with XP Pro
« Reply #1 on: July 08, 2008, 04:03 AM »
[off-offtopic] Ok, i just found out that anything under the "spoiler" tag, can't be quoted" [/off-offtopic]
[offtopic]
On one occasion I put TIA at the end of a message to my ISP, the only satellite provider available to me, sadly.
The reply that came back began with
Quote
Dear TIA...
                                                             
Their tech support is about what you'd expect from that
Those guys are really stupid! Everyone knows you meant you were in the international airport of albania. These tech support guys are just incredible. :P  ;D[/offtopic]

Carol Haynes

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Re: Advice on fixing a boot problem with XP Pro
« Reply #2 on: July 08, 2008, 05:15 AM »
My wife's machine had Acronis True Image Home 10 on it.
I didn't like it and uninstalled it (it seemed only to cover the first HD, didn't want to talk to the second HD)
-cranioscopical (July 07, 2008, 09:16 PM)

I have never seen that happen with Acronis? (Having siad that I haven't used the Home version for ages).

TrueImage should see all partitions on all attached drives - ATA, SATA and attached USB/Firewire devices.

If it doesn't you may find the partition table has been damaged and it can't read it - have you tried checking the partition table on the second drive?

FWIW - TrueImage (IMHO) is great but I avoid the Boot Time 'helper' which I found a right PITA (just don't install it) and I don't use the Secure Xone approach for backups. If you want to reserve a chunk of a hard disc for backups just create a partition in that blank space and save your backups there - it is much more flexible and less full of frustration.

cranioscopical

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Re: Advice on fixing a boot problem with XP Pro
« Reply #3 on: July 08, 2008, 11:26 AM »
I have never seen that happen with Acronis? (Having siad that I haven't used the Home version for ages).
TrueImage should see all partitions on all attached drives - ATA, SATA and attached USB/Firewire devices.
If it doesn't you may find the partition table has been damaged and it can't read it - have you tried checking the partition table on the second drive?
-Carol

Thanks for the reply, Carol.

Turned out that the second drive was a dynamic disk (!??!)
It was slow as molasses on Marmite -- took about 5  hours to copy off 20Gb of data.
Once I had the data off I killed it and reformatted.

I've heard a lot of good about Acronis, but I'm certainly unimpressed by its removal routine.
Perhaps there's something in the documentation that I missed -- I didn't set up that machine.
The Home version wouldn't have been my choice.

It's my week for computer glitches, evidently. 
Just lost one HDD and now I need a new chip cooler as mine's starting to grumble (unrelated events).


f0dder

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Re: Advice on fixing a boot problem with XP Pro
« Reply #4 on: July 08, 2008, 11:29 AM »
"Dynamic Disk" means it uses GUID-style partitions, instead of the old partition table system that has been used for... well, since the dawn of time. It's an option when you add a new unpartitioned disk to a system, Windows will ask you if you want to initialize it as a dynamic disk or not. 3rd-party tool support for DD's isn't very widespread, afaik.

5 hours to get 20gigs of data? Sounds like the drive was running in PIO mode, or extremely full of bad sectors...
- carpe noctem

cranioscopical

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Re: Advice on fixing a boot problem with XP Pro
« Reply #5 on: July 08, 2008, 01:47 PM »
"Dynamic Disk" means it uses GUID-style partitions, instead of the old partition table system that has been used for... well, since the dawn of time. It's an option when you add a new unpartitioned disk to a system, Windows will ask you if you want to initialize it as a dynamic disk or not. 3rd-party tool support for DD's isn't very widespread, afaik.
-f0dder

Thanks for the input.  I wondered if the dynamic thing was why Acronis wouldn't see that drive (the rest of the system did; disk management, explorer et al).


5 hours to get 20gigs of data? Sounds like the drive was running in PIO mode, or extremely full of bad sectors...
-f0dder
For a while I thought someone had swapped in an 8088 as a joke  :)

Not PIO, no IDE devices but everything's set for DMA  -- I checked there just in case.  It's a SATA drive.  Something else was going on.  Transfer rate is where you'd expect now I've reverted from dynamic and reformatted the drive 'from scratch'.