I have become a fan of Western Digital partly because they give a free (limited) edition of Acronis True Image to help with backups and transfers. I have been using it on a number of systems for a few years now.
However, on one of my Windows Vista systems (that has a WD internal HD), Acronis will no longer start. The screen and the screen offering upgrades comes up, but the message “Loading, please wait” stays on the screen and the full program will never become available to use.
I have uniinstalled, and reinstalled and what worked a month ago no longer does. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can get back to using Acronis to backup my drive?
I would have to use an older bootable recovery disk, or try and create one from a different system. Since I can’t get this machine to start Acronis, I can’t readily make a new boot disk.
Online I read a comment by someone having a similar situation that their problem was solved by adding a bios password, since that was a difference between one system that worked and one that didn’t.
Seems to have been a side effect of a problem with my DVD/CD drive not installing properly. I didn’t see this until I tried to make a new recovery disc to test Acronis that way. The error was a registry problem which Internet research said was a bad “filter” on the DVD/CD device’s registry entry. I removed one entry from the registry related to the filter and rebooted. The DVD/CD drive came back normally and then Acronis (WD Edition) would run again.
Alas, things were not that simple, after all. Looking at the registry on a different machine, I determined that the filter added to the DVD/CD ROM drive registry entry might have been one added by iTunes and is needed by it.
I say maybe because I did not make careful note of the one that I deleted on the machine that was having problems with Acronis starting.
I tried accessing the CD drive from iTunes and it failed, telling me that there was a registry problem. So I did a “repair” install of iTunes and then iTunes was able to access the drive. And Acronis still loaded.
I’m thinking that perhaps something corrupted the iTunes CD “driver” and the failure of Windows to access the drive was what lead to Acronis hanging on startup. Deleting the registry key fixed the CD drive access problem which fixed Acronis, but perhaps “broke” iTunes. The repair install with iTunes fixed that, but because it was a true “repair” it didn’t cause the original set of problems.
I don’t really know what was going on, but it seems things are back to the normal state.
