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Backup (created by Acronis rescue media USB) is corrupted

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Hello,

I bought a new SSD for my laptop and wanted to replace the original HDD. I have the following partitions

    - System reserved partition (100MB)

    - C for Windows 7 (154GB)

    - D for data (544GB)

The new SSD is 500GB and smaller than my original HDD. Since I already had a copy from D drive (my data) on my external HDD, I just wanted to copy my Windows drive to the new SSD. Therefore, disk cloning was not an option for me and I tried disk and partition backup with Acronis True Image 2015. I created an Acronis rescue media USB and booted with that. I have a 2TB external HDD which is USB 3.0 but Acronis 2015 does not recognize USB 3.0 ports, so I connected my external HDD to the USB 2.0 port. I did a disk and partition backup (for C & system reserved) on my external HDD using sector-by-sector copying option (while booted with USB rescue media). Then I replaced internal HDD with the SSD and used Acronis rescue media USB to recover the system reserved partition and Windows partition on the SSD. In the middle of the process, I received an error that recovery failed and the backup file is corrupted. I tried to validate the backup later but I received the same error.

I installed my original HDD again and did a new backup. I tried to validate the file immediately after the backup successfully completed but I received the same error (backup file is corrupted).

I followed all the best practices for backup and recovery, such as recovering partitions 1 by 1 (I also did all at once but same error appeared), not resizing the partition sizes, connecting the external HDD with the same port for backup and recovery, backing up while booting with rescue media rather than while Windows is running (I also created a backup in Windows but same corrupt error), I used sector-by-sector copying, I used compression=none option, ...

Please help me and tell me what is going wrong here? Why is the backup file corrupted? How can I copy my Windows drive to the new SSD?

Regards,

Behrouz

0 Users found this helpful

Behrouz, welcome to these user forums.

First question: Why are you using sector-by-sector mode for your backup of your HDD drive?  This is not recommended nor is necessary, especially when you are moving to a smaller drive.  Using sector-by-sector makes a backup of the same / similar size to the source partition and also ignores exclusions.

Using the Rescue Media on USB stick is fine but please ensure that you have the latest build 6613 version of ATIH 2015 installed and that this was used when making the media.

Next, remember that when making the backup, you can safely exclude the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys files and save several gigabytes of backup space - these files will be automatically recreated when booting the restored system.

Please run a CHKDSK /R against your source HDD drive to ensure that there are no issues with the drive before trying the backup again.

Thanks Steve for your prompt reply.

First answer: I used sector-by-sector to include all user data, app data, temp folders and everything on my C drive (space is not an issue for me). I read in the forum that some users had problems with excluding chrome app data by default. My new disk is smaller, but my C drive will be the same size (or larger), so, that is not an issue here because I will just have a smaller D drive for my data which is fine. However, as you suggest I will try regular backup in my next try.

Second: I received an Aacronis True Image HD 2015 serial number with the purchase of my SSD. I installed it and created the bootable rescue media with ATIHD 2015 that I installed. How can I check its version to see if it is 6613 or not? I checked the contents of USB but I couldn't find the build info. There is also no info while creating that bootable media.

I ran CHKDSK /R and rebooted, system checked my disk and found no issues.

I will do a regular backup (not sector-by-sector) of my C drive in Windows now. Last time I backed up, Acronis created one file with 150GB size. Do you think this may cause problems (I am using NTFS on everything)? Is it better to split the backup into 4.7GB parts or it doesn't matter?

Thanks again,

Behrouz

Behrouz, thanks for the update.

When using the Acronis Rescue Media the default exclusions are only for *.tmp and *.tib files, so all your browser app data would be included - it is only when doing the backup from within Windows where a lot more exclusions are set by default, so you need to modify these to ensure you don't lose browser data.

Your ATIH 2015 HD software is an OEM version and may therefore be an older build - in this case you can only use the build version you have as Acronis do not directly support OEM software.  See KB document: 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products.

The backup size shouldn't cause any particular problem so there is no need to split the backup at DVD sizes - that is only suggested if writing the backup data across slow network connections, no need for backups to a local / USB external drive.

Good luck with the new backup and hope this leads to a successful restore on the new drive.

"Corrupted" is, unfortunately, a rather non-specific error message, in spite of its rather specific sounding term. It really just means that ATI can't validate the archive, which can be caused by disk errors or connection errors, rather than any problems with the .tib file itself.

Validation failure is often due to hardware issues. To troubleshoot, see Grover's backup and restore guides http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618 and http://kb.acronis.com/content/1517

From an administrative command prompt, run chkdsk /r on each partition of the internal drive, and on the external HD. If there are hidden partitions, assign letters to them so you can chkdsk.
Also run a drive checking utility from the drive manufacturer, as those sometimes catch errors missed by chkdsk.

Don't connect via a hub, a port in a monitor, or a USB extension cord, etc. Connect the external drive directly to a USB port on the rear of the computer case.