Hard Drive not detected to re-image.

I have the XP 120gig version. I wanted to make an image of the recovery partition and was able to do it with Acronis True Home Image.

Once I was confident enough that the image was good I used Acronis Disk Director and deleted the NTFS partition with XP and then the FAT32 partition with the recovery files.

Shut down and reboot it with Acronis True Home Image to test the reloading of the image file. I selected the file from my USB hard drive and when I click next it just stopped there. Tried a few more times and same thing.

Shutdown and loaded Acronis Disk Director and the software would analyze the system and stop right there, never coming up.

After testing and trying again I finally noticed that Acronis True Image no longer sees the hard drive, but just my bootable USB stick and USB hard drive, so thats why it can't load it.

Im not sure why its no longer detected and I can't boot Disk Director to format it as FAT or NTFS again.

Right now i'm downloading Gparted to boot of a USB stick and see If i can fix the issue. But any one else have ideas?

 

I am also using Acronis 11 with my Aspire One.

So far I did re-image once, and it worked, but I did this by logging into Windows and opening Acronis from there (not by CD). It did work and I was also using an external drive.

You are using a CD to boot, right? Then you must have an external CD drive, like me?
If you have the bootable Acronis program on a flash drive, perhaps something went wrong when you put it on the flash drive.

I've had similar problems on another computer like what you're having with Acronis. When this happened to me, I decided to go out and buy the real product in store and then it worked fine. Are you using a burnt copy of Acronis?

I might just be confusing you....

What I'd suggest is to keep trying to boot with Acronis. If you haven't done so, try again 2 or 3 more times. Also, if your external hard drive is not being detected, just go back to the Acronis main menu, unplug your drive and plug back in, then go back in to select the file. Try this a few times and it should eventually detect your drive. For me, it almost never detects my drive on first call.

I have a feeling, however, that there might be something wrong with the Acronis disk you're using. If it is a burnt copy, something may have went wrong during the burning process, OR the file you burnt from may have been corrupt ;-)
In this case, I'd suggest purchasing the real product in store as it is far worth it.

 

No i'm not using an external USB CD drive. I'm using a USB stick to boot with. I have both Acronis Disk Director and True Image at work and they actual downloads from Acronis. With that software installed I created a rescue boot USB stick. Acronis lets you do that.

I was finally able to fix the problem late last night when I got home. But first the weird thing.
As I said before, I totally wiped out the hard drive with Disk Director. After I restarted the machine Disk Director software would never work, it would get stuck at "analyzing disk". True Image would not see the drive.

Obviously something happen to the drive when I wiped out its partitions.
To try and fix the issue I downloaded the following tools.
Hiren's Boot CD http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd
Ultimate Boot Disk software http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
System Rescue CD http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

All of these tools have options to be loaded to a USB stick.

I couldn't get Hiren's Boot CD working on a USB stick... that's something that I will look into later.
I did get Ultimate Boot Disk working, but all the partition application would not see the hard drive on the Acer One, they would only see the USB stick and it would come up as 1gig.
System Rescue CD, finally did the trick. After getting into the GUI I open Gparted and it saw the Acer hard drive. It was unallocated. I went ahead and formatted the drive as FAT32 and rebooted. After this I booted with the Acronis USB rescue and Disk Director worked and saw the hard drive. I closed that and loaded Acronis True Image and finally I was able to restore the Acer eRecovery Partition.

I don't know what happen, I never seen before when you wipe a drive that it no longer can be seen. Maybe the master boot record got messed up, I don't know it was weird.

So my recommendation if you want to wipe out the drive to start a fresh copy of XP or something else, leave a small space formatted in FAT32.

 

Probably you don't have a proper harddisk controller driver (for SATA) on your bootup USB drive.

 

system rescue CD is a self-contained Linux installation with all the required drivers included. For DOS/Windows based bootup disks, the SATA driver usually have to be added manually.