Help!

Its beginning to get somewhat frustrated. I'm not a rookie, in that my wife and I both have the Z1, one of which I unlocked and bought a 2nd drive to start fresh with and kept the old as a backup, so I moved up to the Z2 version, then later the Z3, so I've used the tools quite a bit to play with these drives..

However, whenever I reinstall the drive after the Acronis recover I get the ominous "Invalid HDD" screen!

This one stumps me...

Here are the steps I've done:

1. Pull wife's drive.

2. Make backup with Acronis as I typically do.

3. Open the z3_2009_virgin1.tib file with Acronis.

4. Choose restore for LDAT and SDAT (to the existing LDATA and SDATA)

(a) Acronis reports 17.51gb for LDAT (which is supposed to be 17.52, but it won't let me alter it)

( Acronis asks LDAT as Primary, Active or Logical.

Note: My first attempt I left LDAT as primary, but then SDAT was "logical" (no choice)

My second attempt I selected LDAT to be "active", and then SDAT as primary. However it makes no difference, either way it reports "Invalid HDD" when I reinstall it in the AVIC.

5. Machine reboots into Acronis mode, and II watch the restore take place.

6. Once back in Windows, I go to the dirve and disable the copyright popup bmp by renaming the files.

7. Shutdown desktop, remove drive, install in caddy and reinsert into AVIC.

"Inavlid HDD"

Even though I know it makes no difference, I renamed LDAT and SDAT back to LDATA and SDATA... and of course it made no difference.

Any ideas of what I can try? I don't want to blow away the wife's music collection. That would be bad... really, REALLY BAD!!!

If you have a complete backup of the wife's drive, try doing a complete restore of the updated Z3 image to the wife's drive, deleting all partitions. Test it. If it works, then restore the MSV and USER partitions (from wife's back up) to the drive and test again.

I never thought of that. Excellent idea! I'll give it a go and let you know.

Thanks for the quick response!

Got it! For some reason, when restoring my pre-backup, Acronis would actually make a new folder and store the files in THERE... not replace those on the partition. Example: If the USER partition was mapped to I:, what I'd find after Acronis recover would be a new subdirectory "Drive(I)" in the root of USER. Within Drive(I) would be ... the root of USER. The recovered USER! So all I had to do was copy those folders and overwrite the originals, delete folder "Drive(I)", and all was good. Same thing happened with MSV...