USB external HD not readable in Win 7 after TI back up
I used the TI 2013 CD/DVD to create a backup of my main PC hard drive onto a USB external hard drive. However, upon then booting into Win 7, the external hard drive is unreadable and corrupted according to Win 7 and it won't read it BUT if I reboot into TI 2013 once again from the CD/DVD, within TI, the newly created TI back up shows up. This is the first time I have run into this issue after having used TI for a good many years. I have two questions:
1) Why is Win reporting the external drive as "corrupted and unreadable" when TI shows the .TIB file as being fine before booting into Win?
2) Is the .TIB back up file truly fine or indeed corrupted?
3) I'd still like to be able to use the remainder of the hard drive I used for back up for other purposes in Win. Why isn't Win recognizing it correctly and how to remedy? Right now, Win wants to format the drive before use!
**Note and update: I may be having yet another issue. I am attempting to use TI to create a back up of the above archive .TIB file onto another hard drive. I am attempting to proceed with this from the TI CD and not through Win. However, for several hours, I've been at the "create incremental backup archive (1 of 2)" message and no progress indicated. Both drives seem to be active, but I'm not sure data is being transferred. When I initially created the .TIB backup of the hard drive, I designated it to create a single 400+ GB .TIB instead of splitting into pieces. Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but thought I would mention it. At this point, I'm tempted to start from scratch by backing up the initial hard drive first (maybe this time allowing splitting of archive creation) and then proceeding with the backup of the backup, assuming I can then read the initial back up in Win. I'd REALLY appreciate any help here as I'm running out of time to do this. Can I just shut down now since the current operation seems to be stalled (or not)? ***NOTE: Not stalled. It's now validating the backup I transferred to the extra hard drive. So, all looks good there, but #1-3 above still apply for the original back up.****
Thanks for your help,
Jon
Thanks for your response, Steve. Well, yesterday I reformatted the drive in Win 7 and then set it as NTFS to make sure it was recognized. I then rebooted and using the TI 2013 CD, made a backup of my desktop onto the USB external drive I just wiped and formatted. When I awoke this morning and after reboot of my desktop, I plugged in the drive. Same thing. Win acknowledges and installs the drivers for it, won't allow me access, but in Disk Management it shows up as a "GPT Protective Partition" and won't allow me access to assign a letter or anything else. I did not assign a password or anything else while doing the backup with TI.
As far as Linux Live, I do have that somewhere and I also use a dual boot Ubuntu/ Win 7 config on my laptop. I can probably copy the contents of this drive over to another one there and I am going to try it later today, but it bothers me that the aforementioned keeps happening as there's enough room to use the drive for other files too, but with no Win access, I can't do it.
EDIT: Actually, I now see what's going on. The problem is with the external hard drive as it is using a GPT partition. Unfortunately, I didn't know this, so it looks like I will have to use the procedure here http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207837en?language=en_US to take care of the problem after first trying to copy the .TIB over to another non-GPT drive. Bummer.
Jon, glad to hear that you are getting to the bottom of this issue - GPT partitioned drives do present a problem to older systems which can't recognise them, I have had this problem recently with a drive taken from a network drive that was in that format and the owner wanted the data recovered from it. I did find a utility that enabled me to do the recovery (UFS Explorer) as otherwise all Windows 7 would do was offer to format the drive!
IIRC others in the forum have recommended AOMEI Partition Manager Professional as a program that can convert GPT drives to MBR. The main issue in doing so is with the maximum partition size supported by MBR versus GPT - where GPT can manage very large sizes but MBR is limited to less than 4TB.
Hi Steve,
Well, trying to copy the 500 GB .TIB file from one external drive to the other using the Ubuntu loaded in RAM only was not successful. Not sure of the reason. Ubuntu said the process would take about 4 hours over USB 2. In the end, the file-- or what I thought was the file-- was present on the drive in question, but when I rebooted and checked it, it was only showing as a roughly 20 GB file rather than 500 GB. Not sure why it did this as I stayed only within Ubuntu running as a CD. It did take over 4 hours, but that's all I ended up with.
Now I'm thinking that I just might not be able to use this drive for back up. It's a smaller, portable 2.5" drive and avoids the addition of power supply cable like with the 3.5" drives, plus runs a lot cooler. Well, I always have a spare 3.5" drive, but a lot more inconvenient plus I usually put a fan on them as they get a little too hot for my taste.
I'm trying drive to drive copy one last time once again in Ubuntu. It may be possible that when I told Ubuntu to shut down earlier, but removed the CD before the process started (and therefore I had to shut down with the power button because Ubuntu froze), this caused a disruption of the drive in question. Will find out for sure later tonight after another several hours and will report back tomorrow.
Jon
Jon, I think that your best bet would be to convert your portable 2.5" drive from GPT to MBR partition table format rather than try to copy the data held on it, assuming that you only have the Acronis image stored on it.
I fell foul of this a few years ago when I (foolishly) decided to attach one of my WD MyBook USB drives to my Smart TV and found out later that it had converted the drive to GPT which in turn rendered it unreadable / unusable on my Win 7 system!
I have a bookmarked favourite to a page that discusses GPT and talks about converting to/from this format.
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ - see the separate section on the topic of converting between formats.
A quick search in Google found some perhaps easier methods of doing this.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725797.aspx - this uses Diskpart with the clean instruction - key point is to ensure that you select the correct disk drive before doing this!
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26203-convert-gpt-disk-mbr-disk.html - this has a tutorial approach, but perhaps best to see the Option Two section which again uses Diskpart if the drive shows as Raw when you look at it within Windows.
http://www.partition-tool.com/resource/GPT-disk-partition-manager/convert-gpt-disk-to-mbr-disk.htm - this uses the Easeus Partition Manager free software to do the conversion for you.
Thanks, Steve. Well, I'm happy to say that the 2nd time I did the drive to drive copy, I was successful. Not sure why the first failed other than the fact that I shut down without the Ubuntu CD still in place. One thing I did do this time was reformat the drive in NTFS. That was the second time I did that, but this time in Ubuntu before transferring the .TIB file over to it. After the transfer and upon reboot into Win 7, the drive behaved normally with the .TIB file shown at the correct size.
I still have one additional external USB drive with this undesired GPT partition, but thankfully I won't be using that as back up anytime soon.
Thanks again for all the help,
Jon