Acronis won't answer emails

March 25, 2009 1:47 PM

I'm having a hell of a time with Acronis True Image Home 2009. My OS is VISTA. I have emailed Acronis twice with no response and have read through their support FAQ. I have a 1TB USB drive partitioned into two 500 MBs. The back up works perfectly on one partition but...

I keep getting "failed to read sector X of hard disk 5" for multiple sectors on the second partition. I have run "Check local disk" in properties and checked both "Automatically fix file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt to recover bad sectors". I have run chkdsk X: /f and /r and told Acronis to ignore bad sectors (it doesn't). I've also gotten "File I/O error" and "Failed to read data from disk". Needless to say, it isn't backing up my data. If it matters the drive is NTFS.

Any suggestions??

posted by Carbolic to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Try emailing them again. They seem to have had an email glitch which appears to have just recently been resolved (this from their email to me). Good luck.
posted by watercarrier at 1:56 PM on March 25

From my understanding the "ignore bad secotrs" checkbox makes Acronis ignore bad sectors on the source disk, not on the target disk. Obvious call - the drive is broken. Did you run any tests for bad sectors with a diagnostic software from the manufacturer? What brand is your external hdd?
posted by starzero at 2:05 PM on March 25

It's Western Digital. Didn't even think of looking for software from them.
posted by Carbolic at 2:18 PM on March 25

Get Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows from the WD website and run the extended test, see if it finds any errors.
posted by starzero at 2:31 PM on March 25

HDTune is free and will check your SMART attributes and do a disk scan.

I have run "Check local disk" in properties and checked both "Automatically fix file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt to recover bad sectors".

What are the results of this? You should see it in the event log with the source being "Winlogin." You might be looking at a bad disk.
posted by damn dirty ape at 2:33 PM on March 25

I've been getting this same error since last summer. I also have Acronis True Image Home 2009 and Vista. Both my laptop and my external HD were brand new at the time. Acronis offers a fix on the support pages, but it does nothing for my problem.
posted by reddot at 3:48 PM on March 25

It's a 1TB drive partitioned into two drives. One partition works fine but the other shows bad sectors according to Acronis. Are the 1TB drives actually 2 500MB drives? Otherwise why would one partition be okay but not the other.

I ran the WD extended test and it found no errors. Acronis still says "bad sectors". I'll also try the HDTune as suggested above. Also re-sent my question to Acronis.
posted by Carbolic at 12:56 PM on March 26

Are the 1TB drives actually 2 500MB drives?

Could be. Ive seen 500x2 USB drives for sale inside one enclosure before. They dont have to be 2 disks to have a problem. If the bad sectors are on the second half of the disk and the 2nd partition lives on the second half then they'll only appear on the 2nd partition.

Considering both the WD tests and HDTune cant find any bad sectors Im guessing this is an acronis problem. Are you sure you ran all tests on both paritions? Did the WD tool or HDTune detect one drive or two?

What brand and model # is your 1TB drive?
posted by damn dirty ape at 1:19 PM on March 26

I'm not positive about what the WD software saw because I ran it a couple of days ago. I'll run it again later but I did do the extended check.

HDTune saw it as (1) 1TB drive and found no errors.

I can't read what I think is the model number on the drive well but I believe it is WTD-AOC(B). The P/N on the drive is WD10000H1U-01. HDTune shows it as a WD10EACS.

Resent the email to Acronis for the fourth or fifth time (case 00067795 in case they happen to be looking) and still no response.

Acronis bad! Customer service sucks at Acronis!!! Do not buy Acronis!
posted by Carbolic at 7:41 AM on March 27

unresolved. still no response from acronis
posted by Carbolic at 10:08 PM on April 26