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optical drive died during HDD recovery project (TIH9)

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My work computer won't boot. I strongly suspect the HDD is going bad or the MBR is corrupt. IT's running WinXP sp3. I tried restoring the MBR but no cigar. The system is rather old (circa 2008), although it's tweaked out and serves me rather well for everything except for browsing.

Fortunately I made a backup image of the C: partition using TIH9 yesterday, so I'm trying to restore that onto a 2nd HDD, which is used for data and older backup images. I made room for the C: partition at the front of the 2nd HDD, and then it happened. I had just validated the backup image using the TIH9 recovery disk and was getting ready to restore the image and the optical drive died. Unfortunately, it's an old IDE drive (40-pin) so I can't find one locally.

I just built a new machine that's running Linux but I'm not ready to transition off my old machine yet. I must get it back up today so I can finish a major work project. I tried swapping out the SATA optical drive from the new machine to the old machine, but it won't work. My BIOS only supports SATA I drives (1.5 Gb/s, 150 MB/s), and the new one is probably SATA III, and doesn't have a SATA I jumper like some HDD used to have.

I'm hoping it's possible to copy or clone the recovery disk onto a USB flash stick. If so, I need instructions on how to do that so it will boot my old machine and I can restore the image on the 2nd HDD. Fingers crossed for a very quick reply!

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David, welcome to these User Forums.

If you can attach the target drive (that you want to restore your C: partition to) to your second computer and can boot your ATIH 9.0 Rescue CD from that machine with your backup drive attached, then you should be able to do the recovery in that way.

You can try using a utility such as ISO to USB to make a bootable USB stick with the Rescue Media but you would need to download a copy of the ATIH 9.0 Rescue media .ISO file from your Acronis account or use another program to create the ISO image.

Older computer hardware is becoming more of a headache these days, especially finding old IDE drives etc.  I have some sitting on a shelf as spares for when I am asked to try to repair such old iron - will have to think about having a clear out sometime as I doubt that the 500MB IDE drives will ever be used again!

Thanks for the reply. Actually, I realized after I posted here that I could move the drive to the new machine to gain access to its optical drive. Since the TI9 rescue disk doesn't recognize USB drives, where my most recent backup images reside, I had to boot into Linux to copy the .tib file to a data partition on the target HDD. I then booted the new machine with the rescue disk and ran the verify operation on the image to make sure the copy wasn't corrupted. Verify passed. However, when I attempt to restore the image on the 2nd HDD, it fails immediately "archive is corrupt" (error 00070020). How can that be?

So I tried restoring an older backup that was natively stored on the target HDD. Same result: verify passes but restore fails. Next I moved the suspect drive to the new machine and made a new backup of C: partition, storing it on a data partition on the same drive. I then tried restoring that image on the new drive, first verifying. Same result - verify passed, restore failed.

So it would seem that the TI9 rescue disk is somehow incompatible with my new hardware (Z270 mobo with 7700K CPU).

The next step will be to create an ISO file from the rescue disk (something I didn't realize can be done until this morning) and install that on a USB stick. If I can boot the old machine with that, I'm hoping I can then restore the most recent C: partition backup on the new drive.

What's bizarre about this is that the suspect drive passes SeaTools short & long tests, and I can navigate the drive when installed on the new system. I also verified the boot.ini file is correct, and I restored the MBR using the rescue disk on the new system (yes, at least that works!). Yet when I install on the old machine, it won't boot.

I have a spare (identical) mobo (ASUS A8V Deluxe), but I already confirmed the most likely component in that case -- the SATA controller -- isn't the culprit. The A8V Deluxe has two SATA controllers (VIA & Promise), and the suspect drive fails to boot on both controllers. Sigh.

David, the only forum hit that I could find for the error code you gave was looking a memory issues for the user raising the issue, which seems unlikely in your case given you have taken the backup to a different system altogether.

ATI 9.0 is one of the very oldest versions of the product dating back over 11 years or more, so the hardware support requirements are very much more limited that current versions of the application.

I wonder if the size of your target HDD is coming in to play with this error?  Is the size very different than that of the original HDD you are replacing?  That could in turn affect the FAT being used etc?

No, the space I freed up on the target hard drive is slightly larger than the C partition I'm restoring (66GB vs 64GB), so that's not the issue.

David, understand what you are saying about the partition size being basically equal, but what is the difference in the actual physical disk drive sizes?  How was the original drive formatted - was this as NTFS or was it the older FAT32 format?

The old drive is 250GB, while the new(er) drive is 500GB. It has a single 434GB FAT32 logical partition on top of the 66GB unallocated space. Until last week, it also had a small primary FAT32 partition (dual boot) with clean install of XP SP2 (for software testing, which I no longer do), and well as a couple of small partitions at the top of the drive, one of which was formatted as NTFS

A couple of weeks ago, I used Partition Master do delete the XP partition (on HDD2) to free up space to  install Linux (dual boot), to test drive it ahead of building a new system. I also moved the files in the other small partitions to another drive and then again used Partition Master to re-partition the drive, with 20GB unallocated space up front (for Linux) and the rest as a single logical partition (mostly holds old TI9 backup images). I was never able to install LInux, but that's another story.

Since then I started getting drive errors in the Windows event log, not surprising given the age of the main drive.  So I increased the unallocated space on the second drive (to 66GB) to make room to restore the C: partition. I can't recall, but I may have formatted that space as a FAT32 Primary partition or I may have formatted it as EXT4 using GParted when I was attempting the Linux install, but in any case I deleted the partition before I attempted to restore the TI9 image, since I know it will take care of that.

Sorry for all the details, but I'm not sure what's relevant and what's not.

Since posting my last reply, I spoke with a tech support rep at Acronis. He sent me a link to Acronis 2014 (trial version), which he said "should" be able to restore a TI9 image. Once I install it on my wife's XP laptop, he said I can create a bootable rescue thumb-drive, which resolves the dead optical drive problem. He also said the TI 2014 rescue media recognizes external HDD's, so that resolves the copy-and-paste issue. If that doesn't work, then I found instructions elsewhere on how to clone the TI9 rescue disk on a thumbdrive.

And if that doesn't work, I'll purchase another direct replacement HDD rather than trying to restore to a drive I've re-partitioned and formatted a couple of times.

David, thanks for the update and further details.  Sounds like you have a plan to try to resolve the core issue with the ATIH 2014 rescue media approach.  Hope it goes well for you.