trying to recover old XP HDD with TI9 Home, but system reboots during 'analyzing partition' step
My wife's 2005 T42 Thinkpad HDD finally gave up the ghost. She needs it to hold her over until I can set her up with something new, hopefully this summer.
Lucky me, I made a recent backup image of her C: partition and stored it on a USB stick. And I happen to have another T42 HDD on hand. It has a clean install of XP, but none of her files and browser bookmarks so I intend to restore the backup image to that drive. In hindsight, as old as her drive was, I should have gone through this exercise long before ago!
Anyway, I'm having an odd problem with the TI9 recovery disc in 'Full' mode. When I select Recovery, which starts the Restore Data Wizard, the computer reboots during the initial 'analyzing partition' message. I tried several times, in some cases making different selections such as "Validate Backup Archive" but the system reboots before gets to the next screen with the drive tree. It works fine in Safe Mode but I can't access the backup image in Safe Mode, since it's on a USB stick.
I've used TI9 for over a decade on my XP machine and recovered several drives during that time and never had this happen before. Any idea what could cause this behavior and how to resolve?
Thanks, Steve. I used the term 'recovery disk' loosely. I'm using the 'bootable rescue media' I created from TI9 on my desktop.
I don't have a way to connect a T42 type drive to my desktop. We live in a rural area so there's no way I'm going to find an adapter locally. To keep the wife happy, I need to try to sort this in the next day or so, so purchasing an adapter online would be a 'last resort' option ;-)
I just created a new rescue disk in case the original is damaged. Same results.
It occurred to me that I could create a new partition on the good drive and copy the .tib file onto that, and then do the restoration in Safe mode. The problem is that the good drive isn't large enough to fit the restored partition and a new partition for the backup image. However, her C: partition was mostly unused space (the partition is 50GB, yet the .tib file is only 9GB). Does TI9 have the capability of resizing the image to fit the available space, given that the partition being restored was mostly empty?
David, not sure where you are in terms of geography but see the following items found on Amazon.co.uk that may be of help to you.
Amazingdeal Portable USB2.0 Port to IDE PATA 2.5inch HDD Notebook HDD Enclosure Box
I'm in SE Arizona. As I said, ordering online is a last resort. I need to get this fixed today if at all possible.
Please respond to the question I posed in last sentence of previous post. If the answer is affirmative, then I can have her back up and running in less than 30 minutes!
David, most versions of ATI have the option of resizing when restoring an image to fit on the available partition size but this relies on the destination location being capable of holding the restored data after it is uncompressed. All I can say is that it is worth giving it a try if this is your only realistic option to get the laptop going again in the shortest time.
Thanks for that information! I'll give it a try now.
The restored data is WAY smaller than the remaining partition if I create a new partition for the backup image. Sorry I wasn't clear on this point, but I couldn't recall the exact size of the restored data. I'm thinking it was under 15GB. The resulting partition will be about 47GB. The original C: partition as imaged was 50GB.
I'll post an update once I do the deed.
Success! TI9 happily restored the data in the available space, even though the destination partition was a few GB's smaller.
Now I just need to determine why the rescue disk rereboots the machine during the 'analyzing partition' step, every time. Unless I can get that sorted, I won't be able to use USB sticks for future backups. Any ideas about that?
David, always glad to hear good news, good that the laptop is restored OK.
As to the rescue disk issue, what type of USB drive was the backup image stored on? If this was a newer USB 3.x drive, then it is possible that the power drain on your older USB 2 or 1 port on the laptop was simply too much. USB 3 devices need almost double the power used by older USB 2 devices.
Could be worth trying with a different, older USB drive.
In reply to David, always glad to hear… by truwrikodrorow…
The backup was stored on a USB 'stick', not a USB HDD, which is what I think you're talking about. USB sticks draw miniscule power. In any case, when I restored from the image I copied onto the HDD, I accidentally loaded TI9 in Full mode and attempted to do the restore. The computer again rebooted at the 'analyzing partition' message, even though the USB stick wasn't inserted.
David, please can you expand on what you mean by loading TI9 in Full mode?
It has been many years since I have used TI9 and wonder if I have forgotten something here with using more recent versions of the product?
When I boot from the Rescue disk, the first screen that loads gives me three choices: Safe Mode, Full Mode and Windows (i.e., exit TI and reboot). The menu is full color, not DOS based.
Safe Mode does not have access to USB sticks among other limitations. Full Mode has pretty much the same capabilities as the Windows version, except it cannot access my 3TB external USB drive, whereas the Windows version of TI9 can.
As I said, the unintended reboot in Full mode when attempting to do any operation occurs regardless of whether there's a USB stick installed. Since the Rescue disk loads its own OS (Linux), it shouldn't be affected by anything I may have changed in Windows settings. There were no hardware changes, other than the HDD failure. I made some changes to the boot order in BIOS after the drive failed to prevent further damage. I removed the HDD from the boot order table and set the optical drive to first in the boot sequence. But I don't see how that could cause TI to reboot in the middle of an operation.
David, thank you for clarifying about the Full versus Safe mode with TI9 - I have to confess that I have forgotten that it might offer those choices given so long since I last used it, and that no such choice is given in more recent media.
The media does use a Linux Kernel as documented in KB 1537: Acronis Bootable Media which shows the kernel version details for the different TI versions.
The analysing partitions process would suggest that this is looking at the internal HDD where ATI will be operating, rather than any partition information on the boot media. I wonder if you see the same if you boot a different computer with the same TI 9 media.
> I wonder if you see the same if you boot a different computer with the same TI 9 media.
No. It works fine on my desktop. I've been using that particular media for 9+ years, always in Full mode. Since I don't have TI9 installed on my wife's laptop, I use this same CD to make her backups. Always in Full mode.
I didn't mention this, but before I removed the failed drive, I loaded TI9 (in full mode) to verify the backup image on the USB stick. It worked fine. As I recall, the next thing I did was change the BIOS (because HDD was making an awful racket and I didn't want to risk further damage in case I can recover some recent files not on the backup). After that, TI9 started rebooting when I start an operation.
As you agreed, It makes no sense that changing the boot sequence could have caused this behavior but if it quacks and walks like a duck...
When I get some time (this weekend), I'll restore the BIOS to its original state and see if that resolves the problem. I'll let you know what happens.