Bad Sector Problem - Here we go again
I am using 11.7 Server. I have an Adaptec 6405 RAID 5 with three drives. The other day one of the drives went bad. I replaced it but.... not it gets to the very end of the backup and fails with a sector read error. If I am there and select "Ignore All" the backup completes 30 seconds later but there is a bit of a problem.....
No one is there at midnight every night to interact with the backup and select "Ignore All" when the bad sector error pops up. I have edited the backup job and selected "ignore bad sectors" but it does nothing.
If you search the forums several people complain that the "ignore bads sectors" option does not work. I agree it doesn't yet there are not solutions.
Several searches also yield trying chkdsk /r to repair the bad sectors but I have always been told that since I am using a RAID controller to never use the chkdsk /r option. To use the "verify" option that comes with the controller.
So this problems had been the topic of several threads yet Acronis has not come up with an answer. If I could truly "ignore bad sectors" the problem would be solved but it looks like another option that doesn't work as advertised.
Has anyone come up with an answer to this problem?

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Hi Vasily,
When I enable silent mode the job fails. Simple as that. The only way I can get the backup to complete is disable silent mode then respond "ignore all" to the pop-up "failed to read data from the disk"
I did notice the pop of says "Failed to read from sector 1,754,010,624 of hard disk 1". According to Disk Manager in Windows Disk 1 is the external USB drive I am backing up to. Doesn't Acronis's disk number match Windows disk number?
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Disk numbers may align with the ones reported from Windows, but to confirm it makes sense to check report.txt which is put into root of .zip archive generated while you capture system report from the backed up system. The order of the disks in this report will match the order detected by Acronis Backup.
The symptoms of the failure are still unclear without checking the actual log files (from both attempts: with and without silent mode enabled) - it could be that the backup does not fail and produces valid backup archive, even though it reports an error.
Also does this error occur when backing up local machine disks to some other location? Does USB drive pass validation via "chkdsk" or is it really corrupted?
Thank you.
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To digress a little this is what has always bothered me. "Disk numbers may align with the ones reported from Windows". Really? I get a message from the backup that it encountered a sector read error on disk one and I can't really be sure of what disk one is without running a "system report" because what Windows considers disk one and what Acronis considers disk one might be two different things? That blows my mind......... Why would Acronis do something like that?
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Jim,
I'm referring to corner cases, where depending on whether or not Windows detects specific USB disk as "local" one, it may or may not be enumerated. In general common scenario the numbers should match (enumeration of disks in Acronis is starting from "1"). I can't see your environment and don't have a full backup log file, so unfortunately I can only guess what the environment looks like :(
Thank you.
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Well... you kind of answered it with "(enumeration of disks in Acronis is starting from "1")." because Microsoft starts with 0. I am sorry but I find that really absurd. Acronis errors are hard enough to decode and that just adds insult to injury. I ran the sysinfo utility and the disk report is attached. It does indeed seem to say Disk 1 is what Microsoft seems to consider disk 0. The main RAID5 disk. So...
1) Why doesn't the "Ignore Bad Sectors" work when silent mode is enabled? and
2) I have always been told never to run chkdsk /r when the drives are on a RAID controller. To use the RAID Controllers chkdsk. It doesn't report any bad sectors. So how can we get past this problem since no one is there to respond "Ignore All" when the "Sector Read Error" pops up?
Attachment | Size |
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432735-141095.txt | 291.41 KB |
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The silent mode should skip any errors, unless there is some specific case, where SnapAPI file system driver is returning inexpected error (or some other kind of undiscovered bug). At this point this issue should really be escalated through our support team - there are definitely some specifics which need to be revealed and addressed. The system report contains the logs from backup operations and SnapAPI drivers logs as well, so it should be enough for submitting a support ticket.
Thank you.
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I too have this issue quite often and it has been asked several times with no real answer. What is the "ignore bad sectors" option supposed to ignore? Bad sectors on the source drive? The destination? Both? This forum seems to be littered with that question but no definitive answer.....
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The "Ignore bad sectors" option works (skips) with the sectors marked as bad on file system level on the source backed up system. The amount of bad sectors can be revealed via "chkdsk" which is also responsible for marking such non-writable sectors as "bad" ones - that's true for NTFS file system at least.
This option makes sense to be left enabled in most cases unless you need to capture an "as is" image of the disk drive, including data leftovers present in the bad sectors - for example for research/investigation purposes.
Thank you.
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Don't know what to tell you. If I un-check Ignore Bad Sector and Un-Check silent mode I get a pop-up saying it was unable to read sector xxx of disk 1. At that I get the pop-up, click on "ignore all" and the backup finished.
The problem is no one is there at 1am to click on "ignore all"......
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