Installing AcronisAlign Tool Corrupts Acronis True Image Home 2012 and Disk Director

Hello,

I just purchased and installed the 1TB wdc Caviar Green HDD on my desktop, which is running Win XP SP3. I also have Acronis True Image Home 2012 and Acronis Disk Director 11 installed. 

As per the wdc recommendations, I downloaded and tried to install the AcronisAlign Tool. During the installation I got a message that it could not proceed because 3 services were running, all related to my existing Acronis products, for which it had to install files. I made a decision to stop the services and allow the installtion to continue (thinking this is wdc, what could go wrong ?) - BAD DECISION. Now my Acronis True Image Home and Acronis Disk Director are completely pooched and won’t even uninstall. I am having to revert back to an image from 2 days ago (could have been worse I guess).

To top it off, I could not even get AcronisAlign Tool to run once it was installed. When I tried to run it I got an arror message that my PC did not have the corrcet drivers and so it could not run until I updated them. 

I phoned wdc Tech Support. I was told that, specifically for Win XP, it is better to use a jumper across pins 7 - 8 on the drive than to run the AlignTool. 

Just wanted to post this in case someone else has similar issues. Please reply if you have any insight. 

use the jumper to force 512 byte mode for XP

HI Vegan,

I am not sure what you mean by forcing 512 byte mode for Windows XP. Do you mean forcing it for 1.5Gb/s ?

The instructions on the drive indicate using a jumper on pins 7 - 8 on the drive for Windows XP but only if there will be a single partition on the drive, and I will have at least two. Also my motherboard SATA driver only supports 1.5 Gb/s so I have had to place a jumper across pins 5-6 on the drive to force it into that mode.

are you sure the drive you have supports 1.5 transfer?  I don’t think wd is even making drives you can jumper to 1.5 anymore.  what model drive do you have?  also, you can use the alignment tool without jumpering 7 and 8.

HI Wayne,

I have the Caviar Green 1TB drive which, according to its specs., does support the 1.5 Gb/s transfer rate, and requires that jumper 5-6 be in place if used with a 1.5 Gb/s SATA driver.

I am not an expert by any means, but all the drives I had considered buying for this PC had the ability to ‘downgrade’ to 1.5 Gb/s when using it with Windows XP. I would love to get a newer motherboard with the faster SATA driver but then I run inot issues with my OEM Win XO license.

yeah, you have a drive that should work for you.  and you should be able to align the partition after you install windows on the drive.  however, installing two different version of acronis could definitely be a problem.  I’d uninstall both versions of acronis, and then reinstall your retail version.  it should be able to align the drive for you.  if you can’t uninstall them, I would check if acronis has a removal tool to clean those pieces of software out of your system.