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I am a big fan of Disk Imaging solutions — it’s a breeze to backup/restore your system.

I’ve been successfully using Acronis TrueImage 9.1 Workstation with Universal Restore on at least two of my previous Dell laptops: Latitude D820 and M90. There are a number of posts comparing TrueImage to other solutions, so I will just mention the main reasons I like it: straight forward GUI with mouse support, excellent networking support and ability to restore to dissimilar hardware/Virtual Machine. I have a networked hard drive that keeps my images and I backup/restore directly to it.

When I received my D830 a few days ago, the plan was very straight forward: backup original Dell setup “just in case” and restore my base image (most of the software is already installed, most of my settings are setup the way I like it, etc)

TrueImage and D830 had other plans: TrueImage would report the following before booting into GUI:

ata2: disabling port

It also had some messages related to USB:

usb.c: config descriptor too short…
usb.c: unable to get device 5 configuration…

After reporting this it would actually boot into GUI, but TrueImage would freeze at different stages of the wizard.

How I solved it:

• Quick search on google lead me to the following article: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=55317 that suggested the following:

Please boot your computer from the Acronis True Image rescue disc and press F11 key when the selection screen advising you to select either “Full”, “Safe” or “Boot into Windows” option appears. After you get the “Linux kernel command line” prompt, please modify it in the following way:

quiet acpi=off noapic

click on the OK button then and choose “Full Version”. That should allow you to use Acronis True Image in some special cases.

That was just a part of the solution. I think that the other, USB related, error messages were coming up because I had D830 in a docking station that was connected to a USB KVM switch. The other possibility is that TrueImage didn’t like my Western Digital 160GB USB Drive — there are a few other posts mentioning something about BIOS Legacy support of USB and TrueImage.

I ended up backing up/restoring to/from my networked drive.

I think this is the error related to USB KVM:

And this is the one related to USB Drive:

Screenshot of Linux Diagnostics, that mentions something about not a “valid Intel Software Raid signature”

Summary:

• Try running TrueImage while D830 is not docked and is not connected to any USB drives
• Use above instructions for acpi=off noapic
• Backup to network location

P.S. My D830 came with A02 Bios, which I updated to A04 while looking for solution. Not sure if this helped. Dell suggests that A04 is a critical update.

Mike Grushin
Partner, CTO