Advice on fixing a boot problem with XP Pro

[cranioscopical]

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.

[jgpaiva]

[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.   [/offtopic]

[Carol Haynes]

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)

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]

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?

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]

"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...

[cranioscopical]

"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.

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...

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'.