Trouble restoring and booting
Hi.
I had a HDD crash in a XP(32) machine.
I had a HDD mirror and I had access to two other machines, one with similar XP OS and another with W7/64.
I have Acronis 2010 and 2016.
I got another HDD (same size) but could not restore using emergency Acronis DVD because:
1 - With 2010 it stopped suddenly a few seconds after starting and without error message. Just stopped.
2 - With 2016 it didn't run because CPU was too old (Centrino).
Connecting the new disk to a USB port of the other computers, after testing 2010 Acronis in the other XP machine and 2016 in the W7 machine I found out I was always in trouble for one or both of the (I think) following reasons:
1 - The mirror had a 32GByte TrueCrypt volume (file),
2 - One of the system32 files didn't have a OS owner.
So, I couldn't simply restore.
In XP machine (and Acronis 2010) I was able to mount the volume and access the files. The giant file was no problem because I had other copies, and the system32 OS file without owner was also no problem because I could get it from the working XP machine.
So, I have now all the files in the (set of) new HDD but ... of course, it doesn't boot because the XP boot files are not in their precise location.
Is there any, say, :) simple method to place the boot files in their proper location?
The problematic computer has a DVD and a 1.4MByte floppy but I don't know if I still can find working floppies.
Is there any utility to place the XP boot files in the proper place with the disk connected to a USB port of one of the other machines?
Thank you
H. Martins
Hi Steve,
Thank you for your atention.
" Do you have an Acronis backup image for the Windows XP 32-bit that had the HDD crash? "
Yes.
" If you do, then which version of Acronis was used to create the backup image? "
Acronis 2010 Home.
" If you have an ATIH 2010 image file that you must restore this using ATIH 2010 because ATIH 2016 does not support image files from that version."
OK.
" You cannot just restore Windows OS programs, folders and files from another system and expect them to work. "
It is not the case. The restored HDD will run in the very same machine (the one where the HDD crashed).
" With regards to Acronis Rescue Media, then the default Linux based media will boot on both 32-bit or 64-bit systems, so you should be fine to use this, but I would recommend that you ensure that you have the latest available version by downloading that from your Acronis Account as an ISO image and burning to CD (2010) or DVD (2016). "
I used the very last 2010 rescue verion (bootoing from DVD) but it stopped after a few seconds without error message.
" If you have both a valid backup image for the XP system plus another system running the version of ATIH that created the backup image, then you could connect the new drive to that second system and perform the restore from there within Windows using ATIH to write the image data to the new drive. "
I tried and got an error message that I didn't took note. I searched Acronis site but the answers included problems with large TrueCrypt volumes and I guessed that was the problem. There was the moment I decided to try to restore the files avoiding the two problematic files (the TrueCrypt volume and the system32 file wothout os owner - I found out later).
At the moment I have all the files in the 'new' HDD but it doesn't boot. I will now check if I did activate the partition.
H. Martins
Hi Henrique,
Thank you for clarifying the situation here for the image file and version that created it.
I would recommend recreating the ATIH 2010 rescue media on a CD rather than DVD - it is less than 100MB so doesn't need the capacity that a DVD offers, plus this will help eliminate the media being a problem. We have had users who had strange problems that were caused by particular brands or types of optical media (or USB memory sticks).
Next, please check that you can validate the ATIH 2010 XP backup image file on the second XP system. I wouldn't expect the TrueCrypt file to cause a problem with a restore as this is performed at a sector level not files or folders, so ATIH shouldn't care what type of files might be stored in the sectors! (I have backed up & restored Linux file systems using ATIH for Windows using the offline bootable media).
Please ensure that when doing a Restore of the backup image, that you are doing a Disks / Partitions restore and not attempting to restore Files or Folders - the latter will not give you a bootable XP system.
Ok.
I have just tried, twice, to recover the full disk in the working XP machine with ATIH 2010-7160. Before this, I validated the mirror and I got no errors.
Recovering to drive F: in both occasions I got the following errors:
<log build="7160" product="Acronis True Image Home" task="A43C6172-333D-4920-B5D9-8B93C94606E8" task_name="Recover" uuid="8E73D29B-0B0C-4106-A2CC-53BAFE6C7763" version="13.0">
<event code="2" id="1" level="2" message="Operation Recover started." module="100" time="1462371873" />
<event code="503" id="2" level="2" message="Analyzing partition '0-0'..." module="1" time="1462371876" />
<event code="503" id="3" level="2" message="Analyzing partition 'C:'..." module="1" time="1462371876" />
<event code="503" id="4" level="2" message="Analyzing partition 'D:'..." module="1" time="1462371877" />
<event code="503" id="5" level="2" message="Analyzing partition '0-0'..." module="1" time="1462371877" />
<event code="503" id="6" level="2" message="Analyzing partition 'F:'..." module="1" time="1462371877" />
<event code="11" id="7" level="2" message="Priority changed to Low." module="100" time="1462371878" />
<event code="1" id="8" level="4" line_tag="0x5FAC360A470D39FA" message="Failed to prepare operations. Error code: 9 'A file system error has been found.'  with extended code: 458.777 'File record is corrupted.'" module="10" time="1462371884">
<event code="25" id="9" level="4" line_tag="0xEF8B1618A4C0DD97" message="File record corrupted" module="7" time="1462371884" />
</event>
<event code="5" id="10" level="4" message="Operation has completed with errors." module="316" time="1462371884" />
</log>
Regards
H. Martins
Hello Henrique,
Thank you for the log information - the relevant entries are:
<event code="1" id="8" level="4" line_tag="0x5FAC360A470D39FA" message="Failed to prepare operations. Error code: 9 'A file system error has been found.'  with extended code: 458.777 'File record is corrupted.'" module="10" time="1462371884">
<event code="25" id="9" level="4" line_tag="0xEF8B1618A4C0DD97" message="File record corrupted" module="7" time="1462371884" />
</event>
There are very few options with this type of error, either your target restore drive F: has a problem, or the backup image contains a corrupted file despite passing the validation check.
Please run CHKDSK /F against drive F: to check it for any file system errors.
When was the backup image created - was this before or after the HDD crash you mentioned in the initial post to the forum? If it was taken before the HDD crash, do you have any older backup images for the same drive? It is possible that the drive was already starting to fail at the time of the backup before it was bad enough to cause the crash?
I'm still confused... it sounds like the restore does work in the same machine where the faillure origintated from? "It is not the case. The restored HDD will run in the very same machine (the one where the HDD crashed)." So are you saying you ran a restore to the same machine and it worked, but is not working when restoring to a different machine? Or, are you trying to restore to the original machine and it is not working because of the mentioned errors now?
If restoring to a different machine and it is not working, this makes sense because of the hardware differences. XP is the least forgiving (compared to Win 8.1 and 10) for hardware changes. You would need to run Universal Restore after deploying an image to new hardware to make it bootable.
If restoring to the EXACT same hardware where the image was originally taken, do you have any earlier backups to try a restore from as well? Unfortunately, it sounds likethe drive was going bad and eventually crashed. Before going bad, corruption most likely had already occured to the OS or system files. Acronis may have been able to back up those corrupted files and validation been obtainable, but those backed up files would still have already been corrupted and would be restored in the same corrupted state. If you have any backups from a few days or weeks earlier, you might have more luck if the corruption had not set in yet or was not as bad as when the last image was taken.
Hello Steve,
Chkdsk f: /f produces no problem. At the moment the disk is, anyway, empty.
The backup was produced in February, and the disk worked quite nicely until about 8 days ago and then, in the morning, didn't restart from hibernation or reboot. Just makes noises. I have no idea if there were problems rising but it seemed to me it was ok. I had no reason to suspect of problems.
No older backups of the same drive.
I have extracted all files from the mirror and have them somewhere in a folder. I couldn't extract two files but I have a replacement for them.
I didn't try to recover with CD boot because at the moment I don't have new CDRs, just DVDrs but I suppose it will be useless.
That seems I have to face the next chance that is to try to make it bootable after copying all files to disk. In internet I see several ways to do it but they seem quite clumsy.
In the old DOS days there was sys f: that would very easily solve these matters :)
Regards
Henrique Martins
" So are you saying you ran a restore to the same machine and it worked, but is not working when restoring to a different machine? "
No, no. The only thing that works is the extraction (the mounting process) of the files individually in a working XP machine and with the save software version. I could extract all except two, but I have replacements.
I don't want to make the recovery to run in a different hardware.
H. Martins
Ok I solved the problem.
Is another working XP computer I copied the c: root files and \windows folder to the disk, used EaseUs PartitonMaster to repair MBR, installed the disk in the problematic computer and started it.
After it has shown that is was booting, I powered off the computer (the hard way), placed the disk again in the working XP computer, copied all the remaining files from the mounted volume except the two problematic files, got these two files from some place else and copied them to the disk.
I then connected the disk to the faulty computer and, voilá. I am sending this message from the reborn computer .
Acronis should have a way to restore all list the boot files to their proper location so that users could copy all the remaining files using the mounted volume.
Thanks for the provided help,
H. Martins
Glad you got it working! Seems like the long way around, but a solution is a solution!
In the future, perhaps you can restore said image with the 2 bad files where it's unbootable. Then mount the drive on a working sytsem or a WinPE system and then copy in the good files over the bad ones and see if it boots then.
Perhaps though, you won't need to do any of this now that you have a working/good XP system again. Image it and hopefully restores go as they should in the future!