MFT bitmap corrupt while restoring partition
I tried to restore an incremental partition image, let's name it Backup8.tib, using the Bootable CD. While selecting the "New Location" where to restore the image, True Image showed me the Dialog "ERROR ... MFT bitmap corrupt ... ".
I found out that this error is in the backup image of my C: NTFS partition, not in the other mounted drives. Trying to restore Backup8.tib up to Backup3.tib failed, Backup2.tib and the inital Full backup Backup.tib did not show the Error. Obviously I was living with a slightly corrupt NTFS for over 2 month and the backup worked (always supergreen). But now TI prevents me to restore that same state on the same partition. It's a feature, not a bug. Acronis, please give us power users a "restore-image-despite-MFT-bitmap-corrupt" button.
How to restore Backup8.tib despite the Error dialog: using a True Image Installation mount your Backup8.tib, which can't be restored. That's the main part of the trick. Luckily TI does not complain while mounting it.
Now use a real disk image tool that can make disk images sector-by-sector from the mounted backup image. (Note: If you had to install the tool, the tool should either come with a Bootable CD or you should boot from another drive with the tool installed.)
For Windows users I would recommend "Macrium Reflect Free Edition" or dd for Windows.
In Macrium the non-intelligent sector-by-sector image backup might fail at the end with "can't access file", so use the more intelligent used-sectors-backup. I switched to dd...
With dd it is important to understand all the options of this command line tool. If you need more performance (e.g. 20MB/s instead of 3MB/s) use a larger blocksize (e.g. 1048576 Bytes) but don't forget to copy the last few 512 byte blocks at the end of the partition/disk that didn't fit into your larger blocksize.
- Get it here: www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.5.zip , store it on your external drive.
- Get the volume name of your mounted image: dd.exe --list
- dd-0.5\dd.exe if=\\.\Volume{e88979f7-9a86-11de-8b3d-806d6172696f} of=my_dd_image.img bs=1048576 --progress
- Copy the rest of the blocks (you have to calculate your own seek/skip value)
- dd-0.5\dd.exe if=\\.\Volume{e88979f7-9a86-11de-8b3d-806d6172696f} of=my_dd_image.img seek=387647488 skip=387647488 --progress
- Then overwrite the desired partition from the dd image. (Unmount the desired partition or reboot to a different OS). Double check that you overwrite the right partition.
Hope this helps.
Regards, Leo
