Dell, XP Home will not start in safe mode

All Done!!

Did it, just like outlined in last post. One exception. Acronis Image restored to C drive, drive would not boot. Three attempts image/restore resulted in failure. It appeared to work, said it worked, no joy.

Imaged drive with Drive Image 7, copied to his drive, done, booted, cleaned up the leftovers, I am done with this!! Praise be!!!

No idea why Acronis couldn't do the job, but I have had it fail me before so I wasn't too surprised. I'll stick with Drive Image, it has never failed me, although, sometimes I have failed it but not keeping up to date images.

It surely was a learning experience.

Thank all of you for all your help.

Martin

 

Glad to hear you finally slayed the dragon. My, my, you sure are a persistant one. I think if you ever post a problem and in the end you say you can't get it, I'll believe you! Now, get rid of that thing quick. Don't play with it to see if it works. Just give it to him, tell him everything checks out ok and if something happens to it right away, just tell him, hmmm, worked fine at my place. I'd hate to see it crash on you and see you have to start all over again.

 

Bob et al:
Been following this thread (previously these threads) for a number of days with great interest. Excellent example of what this board is really all about. My congratulations to all. BMartin - you are an amazing, stubborn and relentless ol' coonass and I say that with admiration.

 

Martin, I must add that I too admire your tanacity and good common sense approach to this sometimes baffling problem.

I'm sorry that I missed out on a portion of it, I've had the funeral of my aunt and two of my wife's friends also passed away, all in the past week so I've not been computing much. Goes with being 68 I suppose. I seem to be wearing that black suit a lot lately.

Have a cold one and enjoy the moment! I just doesn't get any better than this. Winning is the only way to finish!

All the best.

 

Hi Guys, thanks for the accolades. How close I came to throwing that Dell machine off of the second story back porch, just to see if it could do anything, like how high could it bounce.

But the praise really belongs to the people who contribute to the board, without your help I would have given up on that machine a long time ago.

When faced with a computer problem that I can't fix or even understand, I'll post it to this board, with confidence that one of you great people will find the solution, or point me in the right direction.

I post the problem and wait for the response I know is coming. It always comes. You have never let me down.

Working with you people is a privilege that I would hate to have denied.

As Charles Dickens said in "A Christmas Carol" God bless us, everyone "

Take care,

Martin

 

Martin, since you have stated that Acronis won't install it's image so as to boot for you and also that you have had other problems with it in the past, I just want to get a little more info on those problems.

I have never had any problem with it other than when trying to do an image from a boot floppy as we have discussed before. We think that is due to the old version (ver. 6) that I have.

What I want to ask is, are you aware of the option box that must be checked that asks "Make bootable" or "Make active" that appears during the image restore process? I need to verify that since I'm considering updating my imaging software and your experience with the newer version would influence my choice. I'm leaning toward Ghost for the simple reason that it only requires one single floppy to boot up and perform an image or restore one. Acronis takes 4 or a CD.

Regards.

 

Hey Dude: Interesting question because I don't really remember what options if any Acronis system restore might have presented me. I can't recheck for two reasons, I deleted the backup image and the computer has be returned to it's owner.

I'm sure If I had seen the options to make the restored drive the boot drive, I would have checked it, same to restore MBR.

I just don't remember if those options were available or presented when I booted the machine from the CD and restored the drive.

The other failures I have had with Acroins occurred when the Secure Zone became full. Auto Imaging failed, no place to store image. What disturbed me about that was I was relying on those auto images and did not discover the failure until I actually opened the program.

I tried to correct the problem, not by expanding Secure Zone, it was already ballooned to incredible size, but by deleting and reinstalling it through the Acronis program. When I tried to image to that partition again, Acronis couldn't find it, even though it was in the same place as before.

The other failure that occurred is when I changed my Windows logon password but did not change the scheduled backup program. To change it in Acronis you must delete the current schedule and establish a new one with the new Windows logon password. Again the disturbing thing about it is the failure is not discovered until you open the program and try to use the backup. Then you get the message that the backup failed due to an incorrect password.

Add to that, this machine refused to boot from the Acronis Secure Zone in the BIOS by F11. I don't fault the program for that, as this machine has an unorthodox boot sequence, booting from the Raid controller.

But four failures are enough to make me give it up on my machine because I could not rely on it.

I used it on his machine because it only had my drive containing the image, I thought it would be easier than DI7 and the machine was simple enough for Acronis to handle 1 image plus 1 restore. Apparently not.

I hope this info is helpful, I will continue to rely on DI7, as far as I am concerned, it is as good as any and better than most. I was just sad to hear they had sold out to Symantic who is sure to scr*w it up.

Martin