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SATA External Drive Disappearing During Backup

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Greetings,

I am running True Image Home 2010 (Build 7160) on Windows 7 Professional SP1, 64-bit. My hardware is an HP EliteBook 8730w laptop with LaCie external 1TB SATA drive. Previously, I had been running Windows 7 Pro, 32-bit, and just did a fresh installation to the 64-bit version. Following my Windows upgrade, I'm experiencing a problem whereby my SATA drive will "disappear" in the early stages of a backup, resulting in a File I/O error in True Image Home. When I look in Windows Explorer, sure enough the drive has disappeared. At this point I need to physically disconnect the cable and reconnect it for the drive to appear again.

I have updated all of my hardware drivers to the latest version, and checked to be sure all devices are functioning properly in Device Manager. I've also flashed the BIOS to the most recent version. As a test, if I copy a large file (2+ GB) from my local drive to the external drive via Windows Explorer, it works fine. The drive only seems to disappear during a True Image backup operation.

As mentioned previously, this configuration was working under Windows 7 Pro, 32-bit. I can't understand why the 64-bit version would cause a problem. I'm thinking of upgrading to True Image 2013, but I'd rather avoid spending the money, knowing this version had been working fine.

I have attached a screen shot of the errors that appear. Responding "Retry" to error #1 will result in #2 being shown.

Any thoughts or suggestions as to a resolution would be appreciated.

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I have eSATA drives on a couple of W7HP 64-bit PCs, though now that I think of it only one of these uses ATIH2010b7160, and then in "bootable iso" mode. But it works fine. It sounds to me like your LaCie is going to sleep possibly during your backup, though I dunno how it might do that.

In any case why don't you try booting the PC with your ATIH2010b7160 bootable disk and see if you can get a complete backup to the LaCie. At least that would suggest whether it's a LaCie issue or ATIH-running-in-Windows.

Is disk connected this USB2 OR USB3 or eSATA?
Do not use a usb-hub, etc. Plug the external directly into the computer usb ports.

Here is one option to try

Open Device Manager
Click/display the Universal Serial Bus Controllers items
Click each listing for the USB Root Hub
Click on the Power Management option
If checked, UNCHECK the listing "Allow the computer to turn off power to this device to save power. CLICK OK.
Repeat this process on all listings for USB Root Hub.

There is also some power settings in the Windows Power configurations under the advanced settings.

Do you have the same issue creating a backup when booted from the user created TI Rescue Recovery CD?
Let us know your results.

I have the drive connected via the external (ESATA) connector, not USB. I did modify the power settings for both the USB ports and the hard drives, to prevent them from powering down due to inactivity. I haven't tried to boot from a rescue CD and perform a backup that way... I will give it a try.

Thanks!

UPDATE: I believe the problem has been found. Upon trying a backup operation when booting from the rescue CD, I discovered the drive still would disconnect. I then started exploring some of the drive properties under the Device Manager, and saw settings related to device caching. By default, write caching was enabled on the drive. I changed the Removal Policy setting to "Quick Removal" (which in turn, disabled write caching). After changing this setting, the problem was solved! No more disconnects!

I've attached two screen shots of the settings screen, before and after. My only thought is that this must have been set to quick removal when I was running Windows 7 (32-bit), and got changed after the upgrade.

I hope this can help someone else with a similar problem in the future.

Thanks again!

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Although this explains, and can help with the errors in Windows, this will not have any effect on the backups or restores from the bootable media.

I would suggest trying a different eSATA cable if you have one. If the drive disconnects while booted to the Rescue Media, this indicates a hardware issue between the drive and the system board. The eSATA port, the eSATA cable, the device itself, and the power supply can all be suspect.

Bob congrats on fixing your problem. I checked the two eSATA drives on my W7HP x64 PC, one a 4-drive Probox2 and the other a Seagate FreeAgent and both were set to "write caching" and at least the Seagate never sleeps when I do a backup to it. Anyway I did change all 5 drives to "Quick removal" since I don't want any problems if I should happen to disconnect them w/o doing the "Safely remove..." thing.

Yours must be a LaCie issue of some sort but I would never argue with your success.