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nameless

Dec 11 2003, 06:50 AM

I noticed this with Acronis True Image 7 and Drive SnapShot 1.32: If SoftLeds is running, and I begin imaging my active Windows partition, the imaging application effectively hangs. The imaging process sits there, doing almost nothing. As soon as SoftLeds is terminated, the imaging process takes right off normally.

This happened on my Windows XP Professional SP-1 system, with SoftLeds 1.6.

I've already notified the True Image support as well as the author of Drive SnapShot.

xfx

Dec 11 2003, 08:37 PM

Dear nameless,

SoftLeds uses Microsoft’s Performance Monitors and the WMI to query the status of the drives.
It is very possible that these utilities use a similar method to detect when the drives are idle so they can start the backup process.

So… since SoftLeds is constantly querying the drives it looks like these utilities “think” that the drives are busy.

nameless

Dec 11 2003, 11:01 PM

I think that's exactly what it is. I know that Drive SnapShot, at least, watches for disk activity, and backs off automatically, just so it doesn't devour all available I/O resources.

For the benefit of other users: It seems there is no reasonable solution other than to close SoftLeds before imaging, and then to restart it afterward. I don't know about True Image, but if Drive SnapShot is being called from a batch file (such as for scheduling purposes), the killing of SoftLeds can be done with this process-killing console application (I do this all the time, and it does no harm whatsoever--except that SoftLeds must be closed properly whenever settings changes are made, or they will be lost). So you'd have something like:

rem Start of batch file

rem Kill SoftLeds so it doesn't interfere with SnapShot
process.exe -k softleds.exe

rem Run SnapShot
snapshot.exe C: D:\image.sna

rem Relaunch SoftLeds
softleds.exe

rem End of batch file

Maybe the authors of the other utilities will have a better answer--and if they do, I'll post here--but don't count on it.

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