Backup Successful After Sector Read Errors Reported During Imaging?
Some (a lot of) background:
I came home one day to find my computer locked up at the Win10 logon screen. I performed a cold boot, but the system was hanging during boot. I have an HP computer, so it was stuck at a screen with the HP logo. I think this is just branding and I believe Windows was actually trying to load behind this splash screen.
After some research, I figured out how to get into UEFI and perform a HDD test. The short DST failed, although I do not have the reason why, only a cryptic service code from the UEFI. I exited the UEFI, the computer restarted and immediately started a disk repair before loading Windows. The message on the screen said it could take hours, so I walked away. Upon my return, my computer was back at the Windows login and I was able to log in without issue.
Recognizing that I was facing HDD failure, I promptly shut down my computer and ordered a new 2TB HDD for my computer. Upon receiving my new HDD, I booted up, purchased and installed Acronis and performed a complete disk image on my main physical disk.
Towards the end of the backup, I received a series of errors about unreadable sectors. The addresses of these sectors were very large numbers and I think they may simply be sectors in the free space of my drive, but don't know enough about how Acronis images to say for sure. I have a screen shot of one of these errors and will provide it later today.
I opted to "Ignore All" after manually ignoring a few of the errors. The backup process eventually completed and is listed as a successful backup. No mention of the errors. No error log to view from what I can see.
After the backup process completed "successfully", I ran CHKDSK as suggested by the error message. Issues were found, so I ran CHKDSK /R. Worth noting here that I checked SMART status at one point during all of this and it reported okay/healthy.
At this point, I don't seem to be having much success with repairing bad sectors and whatever else may be wrong with my drive. I can get various repair utilities to run at startup or from within Windows, but I continue to get sector errors and hear strange behavior from the HDD read head. it doesn't seem that I will be able to get my original drive healthy again.
My plan for recovery is now as follows. Please let me know if there is anything else you can recommend.
- Boot into Windows and as quickly as possible create Acronis recovery USB and copy important files to my New Drive #1. This new drive also currently contains my Acronis image.
- Buy another 2 TB (New Drive #2) and use Acronis to restore the backup image I was able to create on New Drive #1 to New Drive #2. As I mentioned previously, there were sector read errors during the creation of this image. Is there any way of knowing if this image is "safe" to restore? Do I stand the chance of a BSOD when a corrupted file finally makes its way into a processing thread?
Thank you for that information. I have attached some screenshots related to my original post. There is a sample error as well Acronis showing the successful backup. I don't think they change the situation much, but provide a complete picture of the situation.
After completing a few last vital tasks and transfers, I'll be taking your advice and shelving my failing drive before attempting recovery to a new blank disk.
I understand what you are saying about the question mark of data integrity. However, I would be interested to see an error log if that exists somewhere. Is there an Acronis logfile to be found?
I've also attached a screenshot from System Info. Is this the BIOS Mode entry you are referring to?
Matt, you can access the logs at C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs\ti-demon for your backup activity. You can also download the MVP Log Viewer tool from the link in my signature to access the logs in a more readable format than the raw XML data they contain. The tool does not need any install.
From the error image, it is possible that some of the bad sectors are in areas used by the system snapshot (VSS) service which is essentially in free space on the drive, but it also means that there are integrity concerns over the data being captured in the snapshot which then cannot be read back?
One option you could take here would be to boot your computer (with the failing drive installed) from the Acronis Rescue Media, then make an offline backup of the drive completely outside of any Windows involvement to your external drive, where no snapshot is used or needed. This should then ignore any areas of the drive where no actual data is stored.