Personally, this thing’s always worked perfect for me.  If you hit a snag, you need to head for the Acronis forum.  I had one small question years ago and someone there answered it 10 minutes later.

On the subject, though, I did notice while glancing through the forum the other day that it seems like the people who are having problems are having them while Windows is up.  So, since it works fine on a brand-new OS, there’s obviously some conflict with another program they’re running, most likely a small spat over a particular memory register.  If you run into a prob, just use the boot-up disc.  It’s all-but guaranteed to work, and if it doesn’t, then there’s something seriously wrong somewhere else.

Remember, at boot-up time, there’s no software running anywhere (outside of the program), so there can’t be any ‘conflict’ issues.  If even the boot-up disc is having problems, it’s most likely a hardware issue, either with the hard drive, a faulty memory stick, or even the motherboard.  A format should clear up the hard drive problem (or at least it’ll let you know if it can’t) and there are lots of free memory testers out there.  Those would be the two most likely culprits.

The big clue is how the program responds.  If it’s writing an image file and suddenly barfs, that’s a physical hard drive problem.  If you see some kind of strange error message box filled with undecipherable numbers, that’s most likely a memory problem.  If Windows were up, I’d say it was a conflict with another program, but if it’s operating from the boot-up disc, it’s probably some kind of hardware problem.

On the subject, I’ve noticed with a number of True Image versions over the years that during the black screen part of the disc boot-up routine, it often flashes a number of ‘error messages’, usually dealing with USB devices, but it’s never not worked.  It’s really just slack programming, in that the program should be told, "If you don’t find the USB devices you’re looking for, just shut the hell up."