Recovery fails from bootable CD, but works when run in Windows 8!
Hello
I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts on a small problem that I've had.
I'm running Windows 8 on an OCZ Ibis drive. The drive is reaching end-of life and I've had to perform a lot of backups and recoveries over the last couple of months. These have gone without issue until about a week ago, when an attempt at recovering a recent image of C: and the MBR from an Acronis bootable CD failed.
Fortunately I've kept some very early backups and successfully recovered the first backup of C: that I'd made. I was then able to boot to the earliest Windows 8 installation and recover the latest backup of C: without any problems when running TI 2013 from within Windows.
Clearly there's no problem with the tib file in question, but the acronis recovery environment on the bootable CD isn't able to recover it. I burned a new bootable CD, but had no better outcome with that. The tib file is a little under 33GB, which is far from huge.
Does anyone have any ideas why this has occurred? The problem has affected all of the subsequent backups of C: that I've made since it first became manifest.
All the best...
Hello James,
Thanks for getting back to me.
Typically, I'll try to run a recovery of the C: image, along with the 100MB system reserved space and the MBR.
The first four stages (drive renaming, and recovery of the system reserved space and the MBR) complete quickly and without error, but as soon as the recovery of C: starts, an error message appears saying "Recovery Process Failed".
That's it. No other message.
I've run chkdsk of course, but the drives upon which my backups are stored (I have backups of the backups you see) are all error-free, and all of my recent backups fail, regardless of whether they're the original image saved on my internal D: drive or the copy saved on my external F: drive, yet the older backups are recovered without error from either. And, of course, as further proof that it isn't the images or the storage media, they recover without blemish when I run TI from within one of the recovered earlier Windows 8 installations.
Logic would suggest that it is a problem with the recovery process when run from bootable media.
Any ideas?
There may be errors on the SOURCE "C" drive that Acronis sees in the backup image upon restore. Usually these are listed in the restore logs as "Run list corrupted" or "MFT bitmap corrupted". A lot of times Acronis will still back up a source drive that contains file system errors, but will not restore properly.
Have you run the chkdsk c: /r from an admin command prompt?
Have you run a new backup after running chkdsk on "C"?
Did you try the restore from the newly created backup?
Have you tried to restore "C" drive (from your existing recent backups) using sector-by-sector mode?
The logs are available from the Rescue Media after attempting the restores. You can view and save them fro review here.
Hello again.
There aren't any errors on C: to account for this problem. As I mentioned, it's an IBIS drive; I've broken the internal RAID, securely erased the component SSDs and rebuilt the RAID again before using the Acronis rebootable tools to make the raw drive MBR-based. And part of my ritual backup preparation involves a chkdsk /r on the drive before backup creation, so there aren't any problems on C: when I make the image.
And oddly, the backup I made yesterday recovered flawlessly. On that occasion I didn't securely erase the target drive, just ran the recovery. I actually have a suspicion that the matter resides in the naming protocols for the backups, with the bootable environment unable to deal suitably with some name formats, while the program running in Windows can.
Out of curiosity, whereabouts on the Rescue Media can the logs be found? I use a bootable CD, and there aren't any log files that I can identify on that (and I'd be slightly annoyed if there were).
All the best once more...
When using the recovery media the log file is held in RAM, and can be saved to a USB stick in a simlar way to System Report.