Another problem with "Cannot find volume 1"
This is the second time that TI 2010 build 7046 has essentially failed me. First time was a few months ago. An associate's computer was running scheduled backups weekly and they were validating as successful each time. These were on an external USB hard drive. Her motherboard got fried and we decided to upgrade her from XP to a Windows 7 machine. I wanted to restore some of her files, so I installed TI on her new machine. Went to open the tlb file and it tells me that volume 1 is missing. I followed all the advice I could find here and copying the archive to the hard drive, and whatever else I tried, didn't work. New machine is SATA and the old drive was IDE, so I couldn't just pop the drive into the machine. I bought a IDE to USB cable and got the files I needed off the old drive that way. So TI was useless. I'm glad that the old drive worked.
Flash forward to yesterday, my XP machine. I also run scheduled backups every weekend to an external USB hard drive. Last backup was done on Friday night. Sunday I started getting S.M.A.R.T. errors from the drive on my computer. I mounted the last backup to check to see if everything was there. Looked fine. I'm talking about a full backup, not differential or incremental, just 1 large tlb file. Because of my experience last time, I decided to check the image file using the boot disc before swapping out the drive. Sure enough, I hit recovery and navigate to the tlb file, click it and get "Unable to locate volume 1", and the image file vanishes from the file selection list. I had another full image from the week prior, select that and get the same error message, and once again lose even the ability to select the file.
The drive wasn't totally dead, it just couldn't boot. So I ran another image using the boot disc instead of from within Windows. It validated, and so I took out the old HD and popped in the new and let it run a recovery overnight. Seems to have worked fine with my machine booting properly this morning and nothing missing. I went back to look at the files on the external drive and all 3 images are there. They all mount and are just about identical, except for file size. The 2 made from my scheduled backup routine within windows were the size of my used disk space as I had set up the task that way. The one made using the recovery media yesterday was the size of my whole drive. I don't recall whether there was an option on this when I started the backup. I don't know if it makes any difference.
So my question is, can I ever rely on being able to use the backups made from within Windows? The one on my friend's machine wouldn't even mount. But those made on my machine will mount, but the recovery media couldn't find them when it counted. If I can only rely on backups made outside of windows, then the whole scheduling thing is useless and just creates a false sense of security. Should I let the scheduled backups continue and yet test each one with the boot disc as though I was going to restore the image? Did I do something wrong when I created the task originally? The tlb files mount on my machine, not sure what else I need to do.
Advice would be appreciated. I feel stupid now if I just go back to my regular backup routine, knowing that there's a high probability that the backup images can't be restored. Again I was lucky that my old drive was accessible at all. If it had died completely I would have been missing a lot of data!
Thanks.

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Thanks for the info, but the validation did show a successful image each time. And I'm still able to mount those images and look through them (on my XP machine). It's just that when it came to actually restoring them that the whole thing failed with that error message.
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OK,
If they mount and you can navigate through them I t would be most unlikely that they are corrupted.
Are you recovering via Windows or direct from the recovery CD?
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The recovery CD. I detailed what happened on each attempt in paragraphs 2 & 3 of my rather lengthy original post. In short, I was able to mount and navigate through 2 full backups made in Windows using the Windows version to mount them. But the recovery CD gave me that error message and wouldn't even see the files afterwards. The drive was still alive enough to do a full backup using the recovery CD and that one worked for restoring the system.
I'm basically asking if I did something wrong with the scheduled backups/validation from within Windows - something avoidable so that I can rely on this with more confidence in the future by changing what I'm doing. Or if the only reliable backups are made using the recovery CD, in which case scheduled backups aren't possible. I'd probably end up looking for a different product if that's the case. Right now I don't even see the point of running the scheduled backups.
Thanks!
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Not that I can see.
Reliable images can be made using the Windows version, after all that is how most users make their images.
The recovery CD problem is the worry, as without this working properly it will be difficult, though not impossible to recover your images.
However, in your case as Linux was dealing with a failing drive, it is possible it reacted in an unexpected way.
Have you tried downloading the ISO version of the recovery CD from your account and see if the same thing happens?
As I said Acronis error messages don't always point to the actual problem - have you checked the condition of your ram - TIH is very very memory intensive and can throw up problems that games and other memory hogging software don't?
Run memtestx86 for a good 12 hours and see if it reports anything, do this overnight as you won't be able to use your PC whilst this test is running.
***edited spelling error***
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I had similar problems with my associate's Windows 7 machine and that drive wasn't failing, plus that gave us 2 recovery CDs to work with. My RAM is fine. I ran memtest when the drive was first acting up because I didn't realize it was a drive problem and the BSOD I got could have been because of faulty RAM too, so I tested it before thinking to test the drive with the manufacturer's diagnostics.
Thanks for your time on this but I still think there's something else going on.
Mark
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