Char Jackson wrote:
On Sat, 20 Dec 2014 15:50:53 -0500, Paul wrote:

(Seagate and Western Digital offer
a version of Acronis, which operates only on their
branded hard drives, so you don't even have to pay
to try out some Acronis-written stuff.)

The way that's written could lead to misinterpretation because the literal
translation is not true.

The branded versions of Acronis work on any system that has at least one of
their drives installed. Given a Seagate-branded version of Acronis and a
system containing a Seagate drive and a Samsung drive, the Seagate-branded
program will work fine on the Samsung drive.

My desktop system has a WD system drive and 15 Samsung data drives. The
WD-branded version of Acronis works fine on any of the drives because it
finds a qualifying drive during program start.


In one of my tests, I encountered resistance, so I have
to mention the disk branding issue, so people know what
to expect. I have both WD and Seagate drives on the
system, and some operation I was trying to do, was stopped.
I'm not going back and doing a test matrix... Too boring.

It could have been when I was trying to install Capacity Manager.
I was using the Seagate version, and was trying to do Capacity
Manager on a 3TB WD drive. I think I had to install the WD
version, to get it to work. Capacity Manager is the software
that converts a 3TB drive, into a 2TB physical drive and
a 1TB virtual drive. So one disk, creates two entries in
Disk Management. It's a software solution for using 2.2TB
drives on WinXP (no GPT support). The upper partition can be
mounted on Linux, so you can pretend it's a "cross platform"
solution. Linux does not automatically detect the partition,
but it can still be mounted and used.

The Capacity Manager is just the software that writes 256KB
of metadata onto the drive, between the 2TB and 1TB chunks.
Once a drive has been "prepped", there is no branding issue
after that. Acronis makes the "driver" portion of Capacity
Manager, a separate file from their site. Once a drive is
prepped, you just install the driver file on any other
OS where you want to view all the disk contents.
(I prepped the drive on WinXP, installed the driver package
on Win8, and could view both sections on the Win8 setup.)

Paul