Acronis True Image 11 having problems reading sectors
Having a very frustrating time with TI 11 build 8101. Using it on XP SP3 machine without any problems. However I have set it up for a friend who is a newbie when it comes to computers. He is using it on his computer which has 4 hard drives in it. I am backing up C & D partitions on drive 3 to a directory on Drive 4. Yet Acronis has stopped the backup complaining that it can not read from several sequential secotrs on hard disk 2! What the heck is TI concerning itself for with hard disk 2 for? It has nothing to do with the backup at all! Is there anyway of having Acronis ignore these types of errors and continue? I have the ignore bad sectors option enabled for the job.
I assume that when TI says that the affected sectors are on hard disk 2 that it is the same hard disk 2 that is shown when selecting the backup source.
Sigh, What about my question? Why is TI even trying to access hard drive 2 since it has nothing whatsoever to do with the backup either as a source or destination???
I have to bring this thread back to life. I am still getting Acronis TI 11 every so often stopping a backup on the computer because it can not read sectors from Drive 2. This computer is using XP and XP's Disk Manager shows the following Basic drives:
Disk 0 Old internal hard drive with old data on it FAT32(H:)
Disk 1 Seagate External Hard drive (G:) NTFS
Disk 2 Main internal hard drive NTFS volumes (C: and D:)
Disk 3 Internal hard drive to which Acronis images are being stored on NTFS ( F:)
Disk 4 Old Drive not used except for retrieving old data off NTFS( E:)
However Acronis TrueImage when it is backing up shows that C: is drive 3 (not 2 as is shown in Disk Manager above). Does this not mean that the Drive 2 Acronis is complaining about is the Seagate External Hard drive G:? If so why the heck is Acronis even bothering about the Seagate External hard drive? I am only imagining C: and D: to F:!
Did you ever bother to run chkdsk on your C:, D:, or F: partitions? How do you know if there is or isn't any problems with these partitions? I think you are expecting TI to use a certain numbering/labelling scheme that it may not be using. You can ignore the sector read errors if you want to, but they may refer to your source or target partitions. If so, then your images are not going to be worth much. Do the backups validate under both Windows and the recovery environment?
This has happened numerous times so much so that I went to the time and expense of replacing the hard drive that C: and D: are on. At other times I ran a specialized disk utility Spinrite on the hard drive C: and D: and it reported no errors. Every time this has happened running chkdsk on the two drives showed nothing wrong at all. If Acronis is not using a known and consistent numbering and labelling scheme why isn't it? Acronis is verifying the images after every backup.
Acronis is again complaining that it can not read data from Disk 2 as indicated in the attached screenshots. Is disk 2 referring to Seagate External hard drive as shown in BProblem3 or is it referring to the drive with C: and D: as shown in BProblem2?
Hello all,
Thank you for your posts and your kind help.
PC Guy,
Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience and I will definitely help you.
Since Windows disk management begins counting the hard drives from 0, our software is showing your Seagate drive.
Just to be sure, would you be kind enough to send me an Acronis Report via a private message, so that I can check, if this error message is caused by errors on the disk or, our low-level drivers which are responsible for disk operations.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Please let me know if you have additional questions.
Thank you.
Actually Acronis True Image 11 in XP starts counting drives at 0. Windows Disk Management GUI in XP counts drives starting at 1. In Windows7 and possibly Vista the drives are numbered starting at 0 where as True Image Home 2010 installed in Windows7 starts the drive numbering from 1 while Windows7 starts at 0.
I wished the heck that Acronis True Image would use the same numbering scheme Windows does.
In this case since it is XP on the problem machine you are saying the Disk 2 Acronis is in fact referring to the volume on which C: and D: are as reflected in the previously reported screen shots from XP Drive management.
I have been in contact with Acronis support via email and have done yet another Scandisk /r on C: and D: outside of Windows (like previous times when this error occurred) but this time SnapAPI was installed and the computer rebooted. In the past I have run Spinrite disk verification software on the C: and D: without any problems being report.
So far there have been 1 week of backups done with out a problem. HOWEVER this has occurred before only to have the error crop up. Only time will tell whether the SNAPAPI was the cause of the problem. This is the 2nd hard drive in this computer as the prior one was swapped out due to these Acronis errors repeatedly occurring.
Well it has been two weeks and Acronis has not backed up the system due to the same error. Why is it that Acronis will only email one when the backup is complete but never when it has failed or having problems??
I ran chkdsk /r on C: and D: and Acronis did a backup. However since then it has not done a daily scheduled backup. I received no notifications that there is a problem. I remoted into the machine and lo and behold the errors are back! Acronis was reporting the same errors a year ago on another 500gb drive so I replaced it with a new drive. Acronis continues to report problem with Disk 2. Three weeks ago I also installed the SnapAPI and the backups went find for 2 weeks or so and then completely stopped!
What on earth is wrong with Acronis support via email? I had an old closed case number for this problem. I replied to the last email from this closed case and it created a new case which is fine. I then got a reply from Acronis support using this new case number to which I replied to. I then got an automated reply saying that the system had received my reply and had created yet another case number! I changed nothing in the subject other than having a RE: in it! What on earth is going on at Acronis is it falling apart?
Hello PC Guy,
Thank you very much for replying.
Please accept my apologies for this inconvenience. Our Management team is aware of this issue and I believe they have contacted you about it already. We will do everything to get this resolved as soon as possible.
I am confident that we will fix the technical issue as soon as we resolve the one with the e-mails.
Please let me know if you need additional help.
Thank you.
Well sorry to say but after using and recommending Acronis to clients and friends I have started looking for alternatives to RELIABLE image backups. The frustration level of having to deal with Acronis broken support via email system was the final straw.
When you find a good backup/restore operation. Let us know. I'm willing to move too. They have lost sight of the main/base function, and all the new bells and whistles are causing problems. If you cant do a basic backup and restore consistently, and they can not tell you why it is failing, then it is time to move on.
Problem with unable to read from disk has been happening for 2 years. I first thought the original year old Seagate which had update firmware from their known buggy version was going bad so I replaced it with a Western Digital drive and ran Spinrite on the WD drive which showed no problems. Like with the Seagate the problem disappeared for a couple of weeks and then reared its head again this time with the WD drive. I struggled to get an answer out of Acronis support what physical hard drive "Drive 1" was referring to since in XP Acronis does not use the same numbering scheme as XP's Drive Management does. As the computer running Acronis is not located here I did a chkdsk /r on the main drive which caused the problem to disappear for 2 weeks. Installing SnapAPI also was done. Then the problem happened again. I can not see 2 different hard drives both developing physcial problems in a system.
Acronis TI 2011 seems to be another horror story and I certainly do not need that.
I agree, I have been using True Image for many years without problem. This year, within the 30 day support period, I've already opened 3. The most recent: True Image 11 will not let me restore a partition that I just backed up. The message says that "there may mot be sufficient space for the OS to boot", and stops completely. Surprisingly, it was just a test to see how the new product worked, and the system continues to boot just fine off of that partition. It's a good thing that It did not happen when I really needed a restore !!!!
The problem is that "support" does not understand the problem. (Or is it that they do not want to admit the problem?)
Like I said, when you find an alternative product, let me know.
Hello PC Guy and Terry,
Thank you for posting.
PC Guy,
Failed to read from sector error messages are usually caused by errors on the hard drive or issues with our low-level SnapApi drivers.
Unfortunately I never received or found in your cases any reports that could allow me to verify this. Without these logs it is extremely difficult to get to the bottom of this problem. If this issue is indeed caused by low-level drivers, we will need the assistance of our Development team to get it resolved. Since Acronis True Image 11 Home is an outdated product, we will need to use Acronis True Image 2011 Home to get this resolved. Please download a trial version and let me know how it performs.
Terry,
I will do my best to assist you with this.
I was able to find 4 most recent cases in our system. 2 cases had to do with Acronis Disk Director 11 Home and we did not receive any confirmation that the issue was resolved or not. The 3rd case was about a sales issue which was successfully resolved.
The current case that is open, regarding the error "there may mot be sufficient space for the OS to boot" is currently under investigation. We do not have any known issues with such errors and I would really appreciate if you can let me know if you have any problems with troubleshooting.
If you have additional questions, please let me know.
Thank you.
I would be happy to offer any support that I can. I need a backup/restore product that I can trust. Let me know what I can do.
Hello PC Guy and Terry,
Thank you for posting.
PC Guy,
Failed to read from sector error messages are usually caused by errors on the hard drive or issues with our low-level SnapApi drivers.
Unfortunately I never received or found in your cases any reports that could allow me to verify this. Without these logs it is extremely difficult to get to the bottom of this problem. If this issue is indeed caused by low-level drivers, we will need the assistance of our Development team to get it resolved. Since Acronis True Image 11 Home is an outdated product, we will need to use Acronis True Image 2011 Home to get this resolved. Please download a trial version and let me know how it performs.
I am EXTREMELY skittish of installing True Image 2011 Home Trial. I have seen horror stories of people installing it and then wanting to go back to 2010. The unable to read from sector problem has been reoccurring over the span of 2 yrs. I have replaced the hard drive a year ago and run Spinrite after the install and it showed no problem. However doing a chkdsk /r on the volumes on the drive may result in the backup running fine for a week or two but eventually it will reoccur.
I give up. Life is too short to have to put up with the Acronis support department!
Your support email system generated 6 different case numbers every time I replied to a request from Acronis for support! I am so confused that I have given up getting any resolution for an ongoing problem. Please cancel case numbers 943400, 929415, 938190, 933605, 924441 and 929142.
I would be hesitant about moving to ATIH2011 as well. I'm not comfortable that support understands their product and how it is used my most people. Please see the latest support comment to my problem, and tell me if you understand what they are saying.....
"As i have looked into your issue and I found that the size of the backup and the location where you are restoring is of the same size. " (Terry Comment: It is the exact same partition) "I would like to tell you that while creating the backup image than data gets compressed and the size which comes out is a compressed size. So when we will recover the image archive the final size will be decompressed and will increase in size. That is why when you are trying to restore the image the product manipulates the data and then tells you that it needs more space. When the Windows boots it requires some space to load the information and the data. I would suggest you to please increase the size of the destination partition by some GBs and then proceed the restoration.
"
Unfortunately, my disk has 4 primary partitions, all of equal size, and there is no free space on the drive. I guess that he is telling me that I need to shrink an adjacent partition to make room for my original partition that has somehow gotten larger as part of the backup/restore process. Not only does this not make sense to me, the ATIH2011 is not capable of shrinking an adjacent partition and making a larger space available.
Am I using the product wrong? I would assume that most people that create backups, probably restore to the exact same partition from where the data originally came.
Yes that is what they are saying. I have restored an image with an older version but in this case the backup image was on a separate internal hard drive and there was free space available on the destination drive.
One should not have a C: partition that is completely full as it can lead to system problems. so are you saying your C: has no free space at all? I would think during the restoration that Acronis would use other disk space than the destination for its scratch files.
No, the entire 120GB drive has no free partition space. The "C" drive partition (first partition on the drive) @27.9GB has about 5 GB free inside the partition. The drive has 4 - 27.9GB partitions that occupy the whole disk.
I just purchased ATIH2011 and followed the "First Test" instructions to take a backup and try a restore. I did, it didn't work, but the system continues to boot just fine, without any problems. I just find it interesting that I did a successful backup and validation, and get an error on the restore that says that the partition is not large enough, even though I'm retoring to the exact same partition that I just backed up !!
Well usually when one is restoring a backup of an entire partition one is restoring it to an empty partition sometimes on a new replacement hard drive.
Are you sure the restore even did anything or did it just error out and did no restoration at all? Personally I would do this test on a spare hard drive just in case it does not work so that u do not wind up with a dead system.
Wow, I backup my system every 15 days, and keep a few iterations of the backup. If something goes wrong, or get into a strange situation, I just restore back to a previous level. If I install a product, or new release, that I don't really like, I just restore back, rather than backing it out through Windows, or trying the "restore point" backout. I probably use the backup 3-4 times a year.
The restore did nothing. As soon as I started the restore process, I got a message that stated something like: There may not be sufficient space on your drive to complete the restore, and your operating system may not boot ...... press OK. Pressing OK went back to the main screen. The whole process took just a few seconds. There were no other options like : "continue at your own risk" !!
I have plenty of backups (from ATIH2010) that work fine. Again this was a test of ATIH2011 install. So it fits with my logic. I can easily restore the system to the pre-ATIH2011 state, and not have to deal with all of the problems that I hear about people trying to back out ATIH2011, and go back to ATIH2010.
Wow, I backup my system every 15 days, and keep a few iterations of the backup. If something goes wrong, or get into a strange situation, I just restore back to a previous level. If I install a product, or new release, that I don't really like, I just restore back, rather than backing it out through Windows, or trying the "restore point" backout. I probably use the backup 3-4 times a year.
The restore did nothing. As soon as I started the restore process, I got a message that stated something like: There may not be sufficient space on your drive to complete the restore, and your operating system may not boot ...... press OK. Pressing OK went back to the main screen. The whole process took just a few seconds. There were no other options like : "continue at your own risk" !!
I have plenty of backups (from ATIH2010) that work fine. Again this was a test of ATIH2011 install. So it fits with my logic. I can easily restore the system to the pre-ATIH2011 state, and not have to deal with all of the problems that I hear about people trying to back out ATIH2011, and go back to ATIH2010.