Windows 8 Full Backup - Disk Corruption
I am doing a full backup of a Windows 8 drive from the boot CD so I have a starting point to try out some things and get back to that point when I am done. The backup appears to go fine but when the system restarts and boots into Windows the backup file cannot be seen from Explorer. I do a scan disk and it finds disk corruption. Once I fix the scan errors the backup file appears.
Has anyone else seen this and more importantly does anyone know how to prevent this?
James,
The computer has 2 SATA internal drives. The first drive 300 GB contains the OS and is the source of the backup. Backups are stored on the second drive (1 TB) in a folder. The backup destination file is the one that cannot be seen (viewed) in Explorer. The backup drive is the scanned and fixed when this happens and the file can then be seen.
I will give your method a try, as I have a similar setup here. I have never had any problems when using 2013 from within Windows 8 to backup to my second internal SATA drive, BUT, I have not done it from the bootable Rescue Media.
I'll post back with my results.
James
Interesting results with my system.......
I have two SATA drives on my Windows 8 system. This was a Windows 7 System, and I installed Windows 8 as a new install to the first SATA drive in my system (Using diskpart to clean the drive before beginning). The second SATA drive is a spare that I use for quick backups and testing along with misc. items that I may want to keep only temporarily. This drive was cleaned with diskpart in Windows 7 and partitioned and formatted in Windows 7. This gave the drive the default Windows 7 security settings.
Getting to the point,
I tested the method the Kenneth used in his first post (booting to the Acronis Linux based Rescue Media) and performed a backup of the first drive containing the Windows 8 installation to a file in the root folder on the second SATA drive. I then rebooted the system, and opened File Explorer in Windows 8 to browse to the second SATA drive to look at the backup file. On my system with the drive permissions (on the target SATA drive) set to the Windows 7 defaults, I can see the backup file that was just created. When I right-clicked the file to check the security settings, I was somewhat surprised to see that the file security could not be displayed on the file without having Windows give my account enough permissions on the file for me to be able to even view or change any other options. Once I opened the security tab, and then click Advanced, I could then change the Owner (which was "Unable to display the current owner) to my account, and add the inherited rights from the drive itself. This allowed me to view and use the file without any issues.
Apparently when Acronis is booted to the Rescue Media, and a backup file is written to a Windows NTFS formatted drive, the inherited permissions do not get applied to the backup file even after booting into Windows. This was simple enough to correct but very interesting.
I don't know if my results would have mimicked Kenneth's if the second drive had been initialized, partitioned, and formatted using Windows 8 (which would had given the drive the default Windows 8 security settings), but I would imagine that his issue is related to the permissions set on the target drive.
Kenneth,
Could you please post a screen capture of the second SATA drive permissions screen?
I'd like to compare the settings you have on your drive to the ones assigned to my drive.
James
James,
I restored my Windows 8 drive, had the problem of not being able to see the backup tib file on drive2, did a disk repair and then looked at the screens you asked about.
The drive2 owner is SYSTEM. The Windows 8 tib backup file owner is Lyn (an admin account on the machine). I also looked at tib files for Windows XP and Windows 7 and found that the owner was an account SSID and not an account name. There is a difference between the owener of the Windows 8 tib file and the others.
I attached the screenshots
Ken
When you "scan" the drive and it gets "fixed", what are you "scanning" with?
Do you see what errors are being corrected? Are they "Security Descriptors?
Is the second disk GPT or MBR, and is it a Dynamic volume or Basic volume?
Windows 8 did tell me Acronis 2012 was not compatible with it and I had uninstalled it. But I thought booting off the bootable media and taking an image of the whole disk shouldn't cause any issues.
Jamal,
Are you using 2013 (which is the version we are discussing here, or 2012?)
The issue being discussed is not about the Windows 8 installation being corrupted, but issues with the destination disk.
Assuming that you are using 2012:
In your statement "Backup completed but windows 8 got corrupt and I had to start all over again !", did you do a restore from your backup, or just the do a backup of your system?
I've used the 2012 Rescue Media (bootable CD) to backup and restore a Windows 8 installation with no problems.
Can you describe the procedure you used?
Did you make a backup from the Rescue Media to another drive, or to the Windows 8 drive, into another partition on the drive?
I was using TH2012 bootable CD to backup my hard disk partition to my external USB hard drive. I figured, what could go wrong as I am just backing up (reading).
I had to format the drive and start all over again.
If you made full disk backup of Windows 8 using the 2012 boot disk, did you try an do a restore from the backup your created before formatting and reinstalling Windows 8?
no, I became even less of a fan of acronis after it somehow corrupted windows 8 while backing it up. I thought that is MS meant by "incompatible".
no, I became even less of a fan of acronis after it somehow corrupted windows 8 while backing it up. I thought that is MS meant by "incompatible".
This seems unlikely. It's unlikely that your problem was caused by running a backup from the ATI bootable Recovery Media (Rescue Media). You must be omitting some crucial details, or you encountered a problem later that was just conincidental with having recently performed a backup.
James,
Sorry for the delay in geting back to this. I have attached screen shots of the Windows event log showing the disk corruption and repair.
Ken
That does not indicate that ATI corrupted your disk.
The reason I believe Acronis is the cause is that I use the same computer to backup and restore other operating systems (using Acronis) and they all work without a hitch. So it is something related to the combination of Acronis and Windows 8 that causes this problem.
If nobody else sees this problem then I have to suspect that the combination is exposing some hardware issue that is unique to my computer. I am going to try a new disk to see if that makes any difference.
Similar experiences to the above. Using TI2013 bootable running under XBoot from USB. PC reliably ran earlier Windows OS's. One SATA drive with 2 partitions. Installed Windows 8 from scratch. Used acronis to back up the Windows partition onto the other partition.
First attempt the backup file was not visible from Windows. From the free space shown by Windows Explorer it did not exist. Rebooted acronis, it saw the backup file, could browse it and extract a folder from the backup to the backup partition.
Rebooted Windows, the backup was then visible but was about 23GB rather than the 5GB expected (high compression used). Think there may have been some automatic disk repair by Windows.
Rebooted acronis and took another backup.
This time Windows doesn't start fully, reports disk corruption and enters an endless loop of failing to fix it and rebooting.
There is no way acronis should be writing to my Windows partition to make a backup, but it apparently has, and now Windows is corrupted.
I'll try Repair from a Windows 8 USB boot, otherwise it's a reinstall job.
Update: Windows 8 unable to repair! Hiren's Boot CD sees both tib files, each over 23GB.
Maybe I'll run acronis from a CD rather than USB next time and back up to USB, though no XBoot problem reported on their forums.