quick question about restoring TI9 image to new HDD

David, the new drive will be wiped and re-partitioned according to the file system found in the backup image.  So if the original source drive was FAT32 when backed up, that will be how the new HDD will be recovered as.

Thanks, Steve. So I don't need to format the drive first, right?

Similarly, with such old version, can it restore an image to a solid state drive? 

David, no need to format the drive as gets wiped anyway!

ATI 2019 should have no issues with SSD's

Steve Smith wrote:

David, no need to format the drive as gets wiped anyway!

ATI 2019 should have no issues with SSD's

In earlier post David says he is using TI9, not ATI 2019. 1689: Backup archive compatibility across different product versions will help working out what is possible. If it is ATI 2019 then as Steve says there should be not problem. If it is TI9 then you will need the TI9 recovery media; later recovery media may also work. (The most ancient version I have is True Image Home 10.) Not sure about support for SSD, however if you are lucky it may not matter. You could always restore to a HDD then create a new backup to restore to SSD.

Ian

IanL-S wrote:

In earlier post David says he is using TI9, not ATI 2019...

Not sure about support for SSD, however if you are lucky it may not matter. You could always restore to a HDD then create a new backup to restore to SSD.

IanL-S  I'm using TI9 (easy to read that as 19!), installed on an old XP box that I still use (not for browsing obviously). I use TI-9 to back up that machine.

To test SSD access, I booted my new(er) machine with the ATI Rescue CD created with TI-9. It booted fine but no mouse function. Using keyboard shortcuts, I selected Backup just to see if it recognized the SSD. Nope. I got error message: "no hard disk drive found."

What I'm ultimately trying to do is to restore an image of my XP machine into a virtual machine on my primary desktop (Kaby Lake CPU running Linux). That machine only has a SSD.  I just booted the Rescue CD from within a virtual machine with just an empty drive to see if it might see the SSD from within the VM, but it doesn't. Not really a surprise. The idea was to copy the XP image file onto the SSD and then restore it onto the empty virtual HDD.

I guess I'll need to install a physical HDD in my LInux box with the XP image, and then boot the Rescue CD from within the VM so it can (hopefully) restore the image on the empty virtual HDD. 

David, it has been a very long time since I played with ATI 9.0 though I still have some boot CD's with the rescue media for it!

Ian is correct in saying that ATI 9.0 will have issues with newer hardware like SSD's that may not have been available when that was the current version, and will have zero ability for the variations of SSD's that are now in regular use such as NVMe etc.

If you still have the working XP system that you are wanting to turn into a VM, then I would suggest looking at Clonezilla to make an image of it, and then use to boot the new VM from to restore back to the new virtual disk.  The key with Clonezilla will be to pick the i686 version assuming that your XP is a 32-bit system.

Another option here is to look at StarWind P2V Converter which can do a direct conversion of your physical XP machine to various VM formats - I have used this to convert PC's to use with VMware Player in the past!  This would produce a VM disk that you could copy to your Linux PC without any need to have to boot recovery software to restore a backup image.

Another tool that works with Windows XP...  Convert a Windows PC into a Virtual Machine using Hyper-V

Steve, thanks for the additional suggestions. I already use Clonezilla to backup my Linux machine, so I'm somewhat familiar with that. However, I have a bigger issue now.

I just did an XP repair (as suggested by VMware forum to resolve an issue with XP conversion using VMware Converter Standalone). The XP repair apparently changed something that affected ATI because I now get an error when I open ATI in XP...

E000101F4: Acronis True Image Home has not found any hard disk drives.

If I click through the error and make certain menu selections such as Mount Image or Recovery Wizard (and click through the error again), ATI shows the directory tree with all the drives and partitions. ATI can obviously see the drives so this error makes no sense!

I made an ATI backup image prior to doing the XP repair so I can resolve this by restoring that image, BUT, I really don't want to have to go through the XP repair again if I can help it. In any case, I would likely get the same error after a XP repair re-do.

In researching this error in this forum, Colin B suggested removing the Acronics entry @ device Manager (apparently Backup Archive Explorer) and let Windows reinstall it upon reboot. I deleted the entry and rebooted but it didn't get reinstalled! So I guess I need to reinstall ATI-9, but I purchased it digitally and didn't keep the installation file. Fortunately, I do have my license key. Is there any way I can get the True Image Home 9.0 Home installation file? I'm on build 3854.

David, the first place to look for the ATI 9.0 #3854 installer file is in your Acronis Account provided you registered your serial number there originally.

Unfortunately when I check my own account the English version is no longer being shown but instead the German language installer version!

I still have a copy of the English installer which I have put on my Google Drive and sent you a link via a private message.  Please ignore my reference to an ISO file in the message - the link is to the .exe installer file.

Thanks for the file, Steve! I feel better now that I have an ATI-9 copy!

The "repair install" restored the Acronis entry in Device Manager but unfortunately didn't resolve the E000101F4 error. So I deleted ATI and reinstalled. That did the trick. Thanks!

Dave, glad that helped.

Out of interest, I have been working on an old Dell laptop running XP (32-bit SP3) which a neighbour brought to me because the screen has died, so that I could save all his user data.  I used the Sysinternals Disk2Vhd tool to create a VHDX virtual disk file and was able to create a new Gen 1 Hyper-V virtual machine and attach the virtual disk then get this running as a VM.

Note: XP had to be reactivated because of the change of hardware (Dell OEM version) and lots of new hardware was discovered on booting etc.  Bottom line is that this worked and I have a Hyper-V VM I can put on the neighbours new PC assuming it is able to run this!

There were other problems with the XP repair install so I decided to abandon it and restore my pre-repair image. First I verified the image, which checked out. But when I started the restore (from Windows), ATI locked up. It  had rebooted the machine and progress screen appeared and started tracking the restore when it froze. 

So I booted from the Rescue disk and re-started the restore. It proceeded for about 90 minutes and threw a 'corrupt image' error. Oh, sh#$. That image checked out just before the initial restore attempt!

I decided to try the restore again, but with the original C: partition gone, the computer assigned C: to another partition on the drive, so my restored image would have become H:

I'm pretty sure that would break a bunch of things in my applications if not the OS itself. I imagine there has to be a way around this, since this will always happen whenever a restore aborts after wiping the C: partition. Please help!

David, all restores of the main OS partition should be done after booting from the Acronis bootable rescue media - that may not be as important with older PC's but is for newer ones!

Next, when booted from rescue media, drive letters are different to how they appear in Windows, so this is normal and the correct drive letters will be back when booted into Windows.

Do you have more than one backup image available to test with here?

Or do you have a spare disk drive that you could do the restore to, assuming that your data on the original drive is still intact and hasn't already been wiped?

I probably knew to boot from Rescue disk for restoring OS partition but forgot. It's been years since I had to do a restore. Likewise, I know drive letter assignments for removable media are impermanent but forgot that also applies to internal drives. Thanks for the reminder! It was late last night when I was dealing with this!

I have many backup images to test with. What do you have in mind? 

I have a 2nd disk drive in the XP machine with a lot of empty space. However, that drive is fully allocated to existing partitions. Does the OS partition have to be the first one on the disk (front of disk)? If not, I can reduce the size of one of the partitions and insert a new partition there without having to move partitions to make space up front, which is way more risky (and time consuming). 

Your last sentence suggests that the C: partition (XP) on the main HDD may not have been wiped! Really? In my previous reply (3rd paragraph), I indicated the XP partition was gone because ATI now reports that as 'unused space' (thus my question about drive letter). Of course, that wasn't unexpected since ATI didn't throw the corrupt image error until 90 minutes into the restore. Surely the data is in fact gone, right? 

David, the question about other backups available was purely in case the one already tried was indeed corrupt in which case trying a different image might be the answer.

I would not recommend moving, resizing existing partitions on your main OS drive - I was thinking more along the lines of removing the original drive and using a spare drive to test / prove the recovery process.  However if your C: drive has already been wiped (as is normally one of the first actions of recovery) then trying to recover to the original drive is probably the best way forward at this point.

One action that I would recommend is doing a full disk check on the original drive, including all partitions that are included in your backup images from that drive.  This may be best done using any diagnostic tools provided by the drive maker, i.e. such as SeaTools from Seagate etc.  If any drive issues are identified then this may also have been carried into the backup images!

Hi Steve, I successfully restored the next most recent backup image. It's a couple of weeks old so I'm still hoping to restore the most recent image. However, I've been dealing with another serious issue that I don't understand. When it rains, it pours...

I didn't mention this before, but when I boot from the AIT-9 Rescue CD, it throws (8) sector read errors on the USB drive (Western Digital Elements) that holds all my backup images. I get the errors whenever I select any menu option that reads the installed drives, and once I click through the errors, that drive doesn't show any content. I ran CHKDSK on the drive and no issues reported. And strangely, ATI running under Windows has no issue reading the drive and throws no errors. I can only assume ATI Rescue can see errors that neither CHKDSK nor ATI can see.

Methinks it's highly unlikely that 8 bad sectors on a 4TB drive affect any one backup image so I'm not too concerned about that, at least not yet. However, since ATI Rescue refuses to read the USB drive, the only way I can do restores from ATI Rescue, as you confirmed I must, is to copy the desired image file into an NTFS partiion on my other internal HDD. That's how I did the pre-XP repair restore that failed (corrupt image), as well as the next most recent image that I successfully restored last night.

I'll obviously be replacing that USB drive but I need to find a low-level HDD diagnostic tool that can detect and "repair" those 8 sectors so ATI Rescue will allow me to restore images stored on that drive. I contacted Western Digital but the only thing they could recommend was SMART diagnostics, which didn't find any issues. I have a SeaTools bootable floppy, but I don't know if it's wise to use that on a competitor's product. Do you know anything about this, or know of another low-level HDD diagnostic tool you can recommend? If not, I can post this question in another forum.

TI9 was released about 2005. I wonder if it is having problems because of the size of the disk on which the backup is located - 4TB. This could be explained by a driver issue in the recovery media. You could try copying the backup to another (much small) disk and see if it will then behave itself.

Ian

IanL-S wrote: TI9 was released about 2005. I wonder if it is having problems because of the size of the disk on which the backup is located - 4TB. This could be explained by a driver issue in the recovery media. You could try copying the backup to another (much small) disk and see if it will then behave itself.

As noted in my previous comment, copying the backup image to an internal HDD is indeed how I was able to do the restore. 

Your comment about size of USB drive leading to a driver issue in the Rescue media is interesting... I'm trying to recall if I've used the Rescue CD or done any restores since I bought that drive back in 2015. It's possible this is the first time since then, so those sector read errors may have occurred just the same when the drive was new. However, 8 sector errors doesn't seem like a plausible manifestation of a driver issue related to the 4TB disk size (actually, the backup partition is 1.5TB).

Still, I'd like to do a low-level diagnostic and repair on the drive since those bad sectors may very well be real. Any suggestions? 

David, for WD drives then the recommended diagnostic tool is their Data Lifeguard program as far as I understand, though I think this is now called their Digital Dashboard (just to confuse things!).

Dedicated diagnostic utilities from the disk manufacturers take the longest time to complete the checks, but provide the most accurate methods of checking whether the disk is good or needs replacement:

 - Western Digital drives: Western Digital Dashboard

 - Seagate disks: SeaTools for Windows

 - HGST disks: HGST Windows Drive Fitness Test (WinDFT)

 - Intel SSDs: Intel Memory and Storage Tool (GUI)

 - Samsung drives: Samsung Magician

 - ADATA drives: ADATA SSD ToolBox

 - Kingston SSDs: Kingston SSD Toolbox, Kingston SSD Manager

 - Transcend SSDs: Transcend SSD Scope

 - Silicon Power disks: SP ToolBox

 - Toshiba disks: Toshiba PC Diagnostic Tool Utility

 - Crucial disks: Crucial Storage Executive

 - SanDisk disks: SanDisk SSD Dashboard tool / SanDisk SSD Dashboard user guide

Apart from the above manufacturers tools, the other one that I have used in the past (tho' not recently) is Hiren's Boot CD/DVD which in the DOS tools has an option for HDAT2 which I have used many times when dealing with suspect disk drives.

Hiren's comes in two flavours - the older CD is based on XP and is 32-bit, whereas they produced a more recent 64-bit DVD version based on Windows 7.  Both should work providing are matched to the PC hardware (32-bit or 64-bit).  See the attached PDF document that I created some years ago to help other users / friends.

@Steve, thanks for the disk utility links! WD's Dashboard is what the tech had me run but it appears to be nothing more than a SMART diagnostic. I wasn't familiar with Hirens. Thanks for that tip! In the meantime, I was able to workaround the ATI sector errors on the USB drive by copying the desired .tib file to a logical NTFS partition on a 2nd internal HDD. I'll look at the USB HDD health later.

@Steve, I'm chuckling over the subject field of my original post: "Quick question about..."

Recall from my earlier comments, the XP repair install I did last week went south, and then the backup I made just before the repair was corrupt. So I had to restore a 2-week-old backup and then manually update the changed files. Fortunately, I backed up my XP partition after the botched XP repair so I was able to mount that image and grab the files. So now I can get back to my original objective -- to create a VM that runs on my Linux box!

My initial attempt at using VMware Converter didn't work - XP throws a BSOD before fully loading. That's what led to the XP repair install (based on advice in VMware forum). Bad move. I now believe the actual problem is that VMware Converter relies on Windows "Sysprep" files to reconfigure drivers when converting a live OS. XP Pro includes Sysprep, but not XP Home, which is what I have. 

Next I tried creating an empty VM designated for XP Home and then booting the ATI 9 Rescue disk in the VM so I could restore the latest image into the VM. However, ATI doesn't "see" the virtual hard drive. I tried the ATI 14 Rescue CD (trial version) but it can't see the virtual hard drive either. I know others have done this so there's probably something wrong with my VM setup.  If you don't know anything about this, I'll seek help in the VMware forum.

Lastly, I downloaded StarWind V2V/P2V Converter. Unfortunately it won't install on my XP machine: "Internal error: Cannot expand "pf64" constant on this version of Windows". I posted in the StarWind forum and they confirmed it requires a 64-bit OS.  I'm wondering if it might be possible to use disk2vdh to virtualize my XP machine and then install StarWind V2V Converter on my wife's Win10 laptop. According to the StarWind website, it can convert from Hyper-V .vdh to VMware .vmdk (the format for VMware Workstation Player, which runs on my Linxux machine).

Next I tried creating an empty VM designated for XP Home and then booting the ATI 9 Rescue disk in the VM so I could restore the latest image into the VM. However, ATI doesn't "see" the virtual hard drive. I tried the ATI 14 Rescue CD (trial version) but it can't see the virtual hard drive either.

David, the new VM disk is not prepared for use by ATI so you may need to use the Tools > Add new disk option to prepare the disk as MBR before ATI will see it as a potential target to use for recovery.  See Chapter 13 of the ATI 9.0 User Guide for details.

David Butler wrote:

 

I'm wondering if it might be possible to use disk2vdh to virtualize my XP machine and then install StarWind V2V Converter on my wife's Win10 laptop. According to the StarWind website, it can convert from Hyper-V .vdh to VMware .vmdk (the format for VMware Workstation Player, which runs on my Linux machine).
 

David, you need the older version of Disk2VHD to use it on XP (as I found out myself with my own testing) - I have attached a copy of the one I used successfully on XP below.

See webpage: How to Convert VHD to VMDK: A Step-By-Step Guide - which has details of how to do this on Linux if that would be preferable (using Qemu-img).

Hi Steve, this has been a very frustrating experience and I am eternally grateful for your assistance.

I tried the "Add new disk" option with ATI-9 Rescue disk but got the following error: "Unable to continue. This program is designed to work with two or more drives."  I realized I needed to 'trick' ATI by connecting an external USB drive. Once I did that, I was able to add the virtual HDD and restore the XP backup image (the .tib file was located on a thumbdrive, which ATI could access but didn't surpress the "two or move drives" error).

Unfortunately, as with my intitial attempt with VMware's Converter, XP threw the BSOD 7B error as it was loading. I believe this is due to my non-standard VIA drivers required for the SATA HDD where XP resides. As I mentioned, VMware Converter has a way to reconfigure the VM for that purpose, but only if the Windows guest is XP Pro or later.

Pursuing an alternate track, I installed the legacy version of disk2vhd on the XP machine (thanks for the file!) and with that, created a VM. I transferred the resulting file to my wife's Win10 laptop and I'm in the process of converting it to .vmdk using the StarWind V2V Converter so I can load it directly with VMware Workstation Player. I also burned Clonezilla on a CD but haven't had a chance to try that yet. I suspect any of these methods will suffer the same fate.

Next I will try resetting the XP HDD drivers to standard IDE drivers (without rebooting) and virtualize that with VMware Converter. I just need to figure out how to do that. Normally XP searches for drivers that match the hardware, and failing that, it must be pointed to the drivers. The problem is, I'm not sure which device drivers to uninstall (see attached) or which 'standard' driver(s) to point to.

David, one suggestion before worrying about converting the .vhdx file on your wife's Win 10 PC would be to try it in Hyper-V on that PC.

Hyper-V is normally only available with the Pro version but it can be enabled on Home editions by running a small Windows batch command file.

See webpage: How to install Hyper-V on Windows 11 Home - this works on Windows 10 and 11.

This would help show if the VIA-RAID controller drivers are contributing to the BSOD?

Note: you may also need to use the XP Sysprep tool on your XP box to prepare it correctly.

See webpage: How do I use Sysprep to create a Windows XP image?

I would recommend making a good full disk backup of XP before using sysprep, and ideally, would suggest either cloning the working OS disk to a spare or using Backup & Recovery to a spare then installing the spare to do the preparation.

My wife's Win10 is indeed the Pro edition and I already tried to use Hyper-V to run the VM created by disk2vhd, just to see if it would work. However, Hyper-V couldn't find the VM -- apparently it needs a configuration file, which disk2vhd doesn't generate. The same thing happened with the StarWinds V2V Converter... I converted the .vhdx file to .vhdx, but it didn't create a configuration file (.vmx). I posted a question about this in the StarWind forum. Here's the reply:

"Desktop OSs are not supported by the converter. Try converting the individual disks. Then, just spin up the VM."

I have no idea what that means. I'm afraid I'm out of my depth. 

Note: you may also need to use the XP Sysprep tool on your XP box to prepare it correctly

As I said, my XP machine is the Home Edition, which doesn't include Sysprep files. Otherwise the VMware Converter should have worked.

I also inquired in the MS Hyper-V forum about how to use the .vhdx file created with disk2vhd. I'm told I need to create a new VM and then 'attach' the .vhdx file. I'll look at that tomorrow but that doesn't really buy me anything other than (most likely) another BSOD.

As I said, my XP machine is the Home Edition, which doesn't include Sysprep files. Otherwise the VMware Converter should have worked.

The tool isn't installed but is on the XP install CD for both Home & Pro versions inside the DEPLOY.CAB archive.

You definitely will need to create a new Gen 1 VM in Hyper-V to connect the VHDX file to.

Hi again Steve, I was led to believe that XP Home didn't include Sysprep files (don't recall where I read that), so I didn't look on the CD (and wouldn't have known where to look). Thanks for that tip!  So I just did another conversion with VMware Converter and this time the Customization features was enabled (by sysprep files). I also included the VMware Tools, which I had omitted in my initial conversion attempt. This time, it WORKED!!

Everything seems to operate normally, and fast. I was nagged to enter my XP license key (due to "substantial changes to the hardware") but I was prepared for that. There's one program I frequently use (MaxThink) that reverted to Trial mode... it's like 18 years old and the author has disappeared. I've actually been using MaxThink for 33 years but the first 15 was the DOS predecessor. I once before had to request an unlock key when I moved the program to my XP machine in 2008. This really sucks because it may force me to continue using (and maintaining) the XP machine. Maybe I can build a more modern (and smaller) box that will boot from the original HDD or clone thereof. 

BTW, I was able to create a new Hyper-V virtual machine and connect the .vdmx file from drive3vhd as you described, but it throws the following error when I open the VM:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: system32/DRIVERS/pci.sys"

This doesn't make sense because the referenced file is exactly where it should be, with original 2004 date. I'm guessing this is instead related to my VIA SATA drivers. 

It's been a saga, but I'm relieved it's over. Thanks again for all the help. 

David, always good to read of success.  Great that you have got XP running on VMware and hope you can find a solution to the one specific MaxThink app or an alternative app to use.