ATIH 2011 Recovery Failure - "Run list corrupted" error message
Hi everyone; I'm having a major problem and would appreciate any help.
I use True Image Home 2011 Build 6942 to back up my system drive daily. Last Friday I attempted to recover the previous day's back up and it failed. When running ATIH directly from within Windows I get an error message that says "Recover operation failed." I then tried using the Recovery Media Builder on a USB flash drive and got an error message that "Operation has failed."
Finally I downloaded and burned the bootable Recovery CD. When I run the Recovery CD I get the error message in the Log tab "Run list corrupted (0x7001C)" and the destination drive is converted to Unallocated Space.
I have a month's worth of backups on the source drive (an internal drive) and I haven't been able to recover any of them although they are all validated.
I've done a lot of reading and it appears that the "Run list corrupted" error is related to disk errors. I've run CHKDSK /r several times on the destination drive (system drive) and no errors were reported. I also downloaded and installed the SnapAPI drivers (why are there two versions?) and still no luck.
I'm running ATIH 2011 under Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and my System disk is a Raid drive. However, I don't think the problem is in the RAID drives. As an experiment I connected a spare drive and attempted to recover to it....just as with the RAID drive, the recovery failed with the "Run list corrupted" message and that disk too showed up as Unallocated Space after.
Is there anything else I can do? As you might imagine I'm quite desperate to have my system back up.
Pat L, thank you very much for your instructions.
Yes the System drive is hardware RAID configured through the motherboard/BIOS.
Here's where I've gotten so far:
I followed your instructions but I'm booting Windows 7 Ultimate from a USB Flash drive rather than a "Windows installation DVD". For some reason when I select the "Repair Computer" option I get an odd error message stating "This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible with the version of Windows you are trying to repair." However I was able to get around the error message by pressing ESC to terminate it, then press SHIFT + F10 to invoke the Command Prompt. From there I was able to run DISKPART as instructed.
I then booted the Acronis Recovery CD, went to the Tools & Options tab and used the Add New Disk option to add the freshly partitioned drive. Then I went to the Recovery tab and navigated to the hard drive containing my backups. I selected the TIB file from last Friday that I needed, went through all the options to set up the recovery, then clicked on the Proceed button. Unfortunately I still ran into the "Operation has failed" error message and the process terminated. I can hear some brief disk activity as soon as I press the Proceed button (two brief clicks; it sounds like the disk head trying to write to the plates) then the error message pops up.
Now here's where it gets really strange. Before following your instructions I made a backup of my system as insurance. (This backup consists of the OS and the minimal amount of applications that I need to access the web and this forum). After the Recovery CD failed to restore any of my earlier backups, I selected the backup I just did and saw an option to use "Universal Restore." I selected it and was able to recover my system drive as it is right now. However, none of the earlier backups before today show me the "Universal Restore" check box. And these are the backups I need; is there any way to invoke Universal Restore for any of these backups since it clearly works when selected?
Thanks for your guidance so far.
Jim,
The Universal restore options appears and can be used when 2 conditions are true: (a) you have produced the CD after having bought and/or installed the Plus Pack, and (b) ATI detects a valid system image in the backup.
Note that the feature activation is not linked to the presence of the Plus Pack at the time of backup.
When you restore an image to the same disk (no disk controller change, no interface mode/change), you don't need Universal Restore. If you move from IDE to RAID, you change the controller/driver and you need Universal Restore.
I cannot explain why the last backup made a difference in terms of activating Universal Restore. Maybe that one included a partition that was not in the other backups, maybe changes have been made to the system between the backups.
Selecting Universal Restore when it is not needed is harmless and useless though.
Thanks for the additional information. Now I'm really puzzled since no hardware has been changed on my system. Last Friday I attempted to create a dual-booting system to run both Ubuntu and Windows 7. In doing so I followed the tutorial available here: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/05/22/how-to-dual-boot-windows-7-and-ubu…. I got as far "shrinking" the existing partition on my system drive and creating the four additional partitions for Ubuntu as suggested in the tutorial, then decided it wasn't worth all the trouble and abandoned the effort.
I was under the impression that at that stage I could simply restore the system drive to its earlier status just by recovering the last backup but that didn't work. As I mentioned earlier I have a month's worth of daily backups and I'm having trouble believing they are all corrupted in some way; I did restore the system a few weeks ago and it worked just fine,and all the backups were validated. So its odd to me that the backups made today can be restored but none of the backups from Friday or before can be restored. The system gets as far as writing the MBR to disk then crashes at the point where its restoring the actual files with a "Operation has failed" error message.
When you restore, do you restore the entire disk, including the MBR+track0?
Are you positive that the drive interface or the BIOS settings were not changed, even unbeknowst to you?
Yes, I'm restoring the entire disk including the Master Boot Record and Track 0; but excluding the disk signature option.
I rechecked after seeing your comment and I did modify the default BIOS settings. I'm using a Gigabyte motherboard and by default support for USB Flash drives are disabled so I had to enable it in order to boot using ATIH or Windows 7 on a flash drive. Since I'm now using a Recovery CD instead, I restored the BIOS settings to their original but sitll I still can't recover.
After more than a week of frustration in trying to recover any of my backups I've decided to bite the bullet and rebuild my system from scratch. It will probably take a week to get it done since I have a large number of Photoshop plug-ins and actions that have to be installed just right. Thanks to everyone who attempted to help.
My question now is; does it improve ATIH 2011's reliability to install SnapAPI (the SnapAPISetup download)?
Thanks
JIm,
I don't think that your problem was coming from snapAPI. I think the problem was that some partition was not included in your previous backups, or there was a change in ATI's build (eg the images were done by an older build/version of ATI) or in ATI's configuration that changed the recovery CD (for the UR feature thing), and/or in some hardware setting...
Updating SnapAPI can be required when there is some disk detection issues running in Windows, but it is not something that you upgrade just because there is a new version.