Run list corrupted and operating system will not be able to boot

David, sorry to read on the various different problems you have described above!

Please can you confirm what the current state of play is your PC here?

Are you still able to boot into Windows 10 without any problems, i.e. to get to the desktop and just have problems with Windows Update?

The 'run list corrupted' error can be caused by two different but related areas:

By a file system error on your main C: OS drive or associated partitions.

By a file system error for the same main C: OS drive or associated partition as captured by ATI in your backup image file.

For the first area, then performing CHKDSK C: /R on the OS drive (via a Windows restart) or when booted from a Windows 10 Install or Recovery disc (DVD) or USB stick, would be a first recommendation.
Note: it is possible that a file system issue could also occur in one of the hidden / system partitions on the drive.

For the second area, then do you have more than one backup image that you could use for recovery?

If you are able to work within the Windows 10 desktop environment, then a further option here is to create an Acronis System Report zip file, then extract the disks.txt report from this and post a copy using the File > Upload option for this topic.

The disk.txt report should show if Acronis have detected any file system errors and indicate where there occur and what type of issue has been found.  See an example below from a topic I dealt with last year with a similar issue:

2-   d(1) GPT   1.8T NVME  0-0-0    NVMe Samsung SSD 970 2B2Q
                                  MBR                                ------
                                  GPTpri                             -----v
  -1       ----  499M  499M  485M NTFS   27 Windows RE H Recovery... --c--V
  -2       ----   99M   99M   69M FAT32  EF EFI          ........... --c--V
                                  MSresr                             -----v
  -4       --DC  1.8T  1.8T  832G NTFS   07 NTFS, HPFS   ........... --e--V
  -5       ----  562M  562M   84M NTFS   27 Windows RE H ........... --c--V
                 1.1M             unallc                             ------
                                  GPTbck                             ------

-----------------------------------

Partition 2-4: file system
  FS:                NTFS
  File System Error 0x7001c: Run list is corrupted.

Hi Steve,

Thank you for your very prompt answer and very complete treatment of the issue. I’ve been under siege, so it has taken me a while to respond. The mystery has somewhat deepened and I’m concerned that if I launch a recovery if it will run to completion or leave me with a brick. Details of this adventure follow

Re: Please can you confirm what the current state of play is your PC here?

This Win 10 Pro 64 system is loaded with about 193 applications. The way I came upon the restore problem was because the system had suddenly refused to take MS updates. Everything else appeared to be working wonderfully and booting was normal and without incident. So, I went to a recent backup to try to put the restore function back on line.

I ran chkdsk /f /r without any discernable change in operation.

I have also in the past noted that if there is a corruption on C: that Acronis refuses to make the backup until that is fixed. I tried recovery from several TIBs on different spindles using the Acronis 2016 Rescue Disk and got similar failures. That lead me to total confusion as to what was going on. I also ran DISM a couple of times and SFC /Scannow. I think it was DISM that said that there was something it wanted to fix but couldn’t figure out how.

I tried to run ChkDsk on the hidden/system partitions, but I was not smart enough to make that happen.

Then I did a non-destructive, in-place Win 10 upgrade. No improvement.

While I was doing all these things, I also  

I ran Acronis System Report, however only from the Rescue Disk. I didn’t see where to run it from Acronis running under Win 10. I will upload the system report disks.txt report for you.
 

Somewhere along the steps I’m outlined above I began to suspect that some of the issues I encountered were because of how I create the backups.

I only make full drive, non-incremental, non-scheduled backups (unless just backing up selected files).

I make the backups to multiple difference spindles – has proved invaluable in the past when a backup volume was damaged! I have about 5 USB 3 drives, the two most recent are 8TB Seagate drives.

So a particular Acronis “job”  might be named, “System 1 C Drive Backup to External”. Sometimes a given spindle may be on the G drive, sometimes the H drive, sometimes the I drive. So, I had developed the practice of just changing the destination at run time. Perhaps this has something to do with the error messages of can’t find the original volume. But I don’t understand why that would apply if each backup is a full backup.

Question: How do I delete the history of backups on the computer? I had seen that once, but can’t remember where it was.

I have just retained outside services that went through thorough scanning of the system and yet another non-destructive in-place update. The failure to install MS updates persisted. Finally we went through the registry, carefully pruning out various update settings, and finally update came back on line.

Since that time I did a repair re-install of Acronis 2016 and I’ve created about 6 copies of the updated C Drive.

I have not attempted any restore since I wrote to you initially. My fear is that I could start to restore over a working C Drive and if the restore did not complete, then I would have a brick. I have selectively brought in assorted individual folders and files from several backups and that has been fine. I have no trouble exploring the various Acronis TIBs.

Question: How do I ensure that if I need to do a restore that it will work?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

David, thanks for the lengthy update and responses to my questions.

First the disks.txt doesn't show any file system issuers with your installed / connected drives, so the only question arising is to ask if this is a dual-boot system?  The reason for asking is that I see two EFI System partitions, one on your Samsung 860 SSD hosting your C: drive, and another on your Team L3 Evo SSD with your F: drive?

Question: How do I delete the history of backups on the computer? I had seen that once, but can’t remember where it was.

There is no quick and easy method of deleting the history of backups from within the ATI app itself short of doing a full uninstall and then reinstalling again!  However, what you can do is to force the internal database that ATI uses to track all the backup files it creates, to be rebuilt then perform a validation of your backup tasks to get the existing files to be re-registered again.

See KB 60915: Acronis True Image: repairing program settings - for details of doing this.

Question: How do I ensure that if I need to do a restore that it will work?

First, it is good news that the Windows update issue has been resolved via the registry entries clean up actions!

The answer to your question is not so easy!

I would suggest investing in a spare replacement drive for your main OS drive (Samsung 860 SSD) so that any testing of a recovery could be performed while the working drive is safely removed from the PC and using the spare drive in its place.

The alternative method would be to use an application such as VMware Player or VirtualBox to create a Virtual Machine based on the same scenario as your PC, i.e. UEFI boot, Windows 10 64-bit with a sufficiently large virtual disk to allow you to test a restore to that system by booting the VM using the Acronis Rescue Media in an .ISO form.

Hello Steve,

Wow, what a terrifically talented and giving person you are. Thank you for your help.

What a great thing you picked up about the C and the F drives. The system, in fact is single boot. At one time the SSD on F was the bootable C Drive. The current C drive is 4x the size, and I scavenged the smaller drive and placed it as F as a repository for Outlook PST backups. That way I can do frequent, full, fast PST backups without writing out the entire system.

So, since I have lots of copies of the PSTs, I guess I should format the F Drive to get rid of the EFI System partition and then simply put the PSTs back out there. Is that a good plan, and would it tend to be less confusing to the Recovery programs?

I thought I remembered that there were a couple of database files that could be deleted and that Acronis would then start to build them again from new activity. That seems to correspond to method 1 or method 2 of the link you gave me on repairing program settings. Am I mis-remembering that?

And how do I force a revalidation of a TIB file??

Question: How do I ensure that if I need to do a restore that it will work?

Thank you for the fine and sensible suggestion on getting a blank disk to be able to test restore in a totally benign manner.

In the meantime, in your experience, would you sense any real issues since I’ve been able to write many new full volume backups and the internal and external drives appear solid and Acronis has been repair installed? And I fully confirm to you that past experience is not guarantee of future performance!

And perhaps if I sterilize the F drive as discussed above that would help things, too.

In fact C is only 183 gigs, so I suppose I could make F a  C drive and restore to that smaller drive and see how that went? If it went fine, then it would seem I could put big C back in place, resterilize the small drive and put it back in the F position and revert it again to duty as a PST backup.

The VMware Player/VirtualBox solution is likely beyond my capabilities or available time slices. But it is powerful and impressive.

And Steve, the thanks in this problem handling are surely due in your direction! Great support. Many thanks.

David, regarding the old OS boot 240GB SSD, I would recommend that you download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard (MPW) software and install this on your PC.

Using MPW you can remove the 100MB EFI partition on the SSD safely and then give the spare space to the main NTFS partition by using the Resize option.  This will save you from needing to format the whole drive or move your PST files.

When using any tool to work with disk drives and partitions, always double check that you have selected the correct drive and partition to work with!

See the screen shots below from MPW and note that the (right-click) menu shown when a partition is selected is different according to the type of partition.  This is because the first partition was a system reserved one, whereas the second was a normal NTFS data partition, thus the latter has an Explore option to allow you to check you have picked the correct drive!

Only option 1. of the repair document is needed to force the database to be rebuilt.
(Option 2 is removing all scheduled task settings which shouldn't be needed here).

Validation is available both within the ATI main application from the task menu for each backup task - click on the carat 'v' shown to the right of each task name - and also in the right-click menu for any .tib file shown in Explorer within the Acronis True Image menu option.

In fact C is only 183 gigs, so I suppose I could make F a  C drive and restore to that smaller drive and see how that went? If it went fine, then it would seem I could put big C back in place, resterilize the small drive and put it back in the F position and revert it again to duty as a PST backup.

If attempting the above method, then I would recommend doing a disk / system cleanup of your larger C: drive first to ensure that you make this as small as it can be without needing to start moving data.

Type in 'Disk' in Windows then select the Disk Clean-up option shown, then in the panel that is shown, click on button to 'Clean up system files' which will launch a further panel with more options for saving space!

As you can see from the above, I was able to save just over 9GB of space on my own C: drive and thus reduce the size of a backup image of the same.

Make a new backup image if you have achieved a significant space saving.

To do this type of test, shutdown, remove the working larger C: SSD and move the older small F: SSD to where you removed the C:

Note: there is no need to format the F: SSD but obviously copy or move the PST files etc to another drive.  The F: SSD will be wiped as the first action of a Recovery operation.

Boot the PC from your Acronis Rescue Media in UEFI mode then do the recovery, again making certain you are selecting the 240GB SSD for the target drive.

Hi ya Steve,

There are a lot more smiles here now, and you've certainly helped me get there.

I did eventually determine that my Win 10 platform was solid with the exception of the automatic updating. After much mashing around, I decided to compare my registry settings with one of my other machines and it was immediately happy after I brought the offending machine into conformance with other platforms.

I also used diskpart to zap the SSD on F: to get rid of the bogus partition.

Following your suggestion to delete and reinstall Acronis, it s working fine, too, including having no trouble backing up a specific number of versions before deleting older versions.

Since I had been having that issue on multiple machines, I deleted and reinstalled and reconfigured the various custom backups, and all see wonderful today. I think what took place was that Acronis had been on the various platforms for quite some time and through several versions of Windows without being reinstalled. On some of the machines Acronis had been there through Win 10, Win 7, and maybe Win XP. I'm guessing that somethings got broken along the way of the various upgrades. Fresh install seems to have cured those things.

The matter of not finding the path to some of the initial versions seems to have been related to spindles getting differen drive designations depending on what else was plugged into USB ports at the same time. Now I have adjusted operations to ensure that the drive letters do not change between uses.

So things are back as they should be and along the excellent performance that has kept me using Acronis since Version 8.

Fyi, I had tried the 2020 version, but did not want to be forced into doing incremental backups, so I had the company revert my 2020 licenses down to additional 2016 licenses so all my platforms are consistent.

But you are the consumate gentleman and benefactor. Our user community is really blessed to have your knowledge and your commitment to our successful and flawless operations.

I thank you sincerely.

David

David, always grateful to read of a successful conclusion to issues brought to the forums!