New and Lost: Help much Appreciated

[billharris44]

I purchased TrueImage 10 tonight to work with my Maxtor Passport external drive (because the Retrospect express HD utility included with the drive is garbage). I wanted to back up the entire C: drive (an SATA WD Raptor) to the external drive (for a full backup)--I selected all of C: to backup, and the Passport (e:) as the destination. The backup started running, but very quickly it quit with a "Hard drive failed--channel 0, drive 0, primary" message.

I'm sure I'm doing something totally stupid to cause this, but I have no idea what. I've verified that the passport is formatted (same file system as c: drive), and I'm able to copy other files to the drive with no problem (for example, after the backup failed twice, I was able to run a .pst backup from Outlook).

Could someone please point me in the right direction here? Thanks very much.

[bodgy]

Sounds like a USB problem. Is the drive connected via an external hub? If so try plugging the drive straight into a motherboard socket.

If you aren't using an external hub and the drive is connected to one of the front USB ports, try using one of the back ones.

I take it TI actually shows the external drive in it's explorer window?

Do these passport drives have any special built in firmware that expect to use their own imaging software?

Colin

[billharris44]

Thanks, Colin. The Passport drives are supposed to able to use other backup software. I did have it plugged into one of the front panel USB ports, so I'll try to plug it into the back.

[billharris44]

I moved it to one of the USB ports on the back of my system and receiver the same error. Here's exactly what I'm doing:
Start up the program.
Choose backup.
Choose disk 1--local disk
make e: the backup destination and create a file name
choose "new full backup archive"
choose set options manually (all I change is to add the option to validate backup upon completion)

Then I start the backup and get this error:
Disk Error
Disk failed!!!
Disk location (controller 0, channel 0, Master)

I looked in the log and the last entry each time I've tried to run a backup is "locking partition C:". It never gets past that.

I am running Bit Defender for anti-virus. Could that interfere in any way with the program trying to lock the C: drive?

Thanks very much for the help.

[GroverH]

Why not try creating the backup from the user created Acronis Bootable Rescue CD. If you have not already created the CD, you should do so anyway!

[billharris44]

I used the "create bootable rescue media" and created a CD. Operation completed successfully with no error messages. Then, when I tried to boot from it (after assigning the drive boot priority in the bios), I got a boot failure message and it asked me to insert the system disk.

You guys are offering good suggestions, and I have no idea why they're not working. I was able to boot to a CD yesterday (the Norton recovery disk), so the system can do it.

[GroverH]

Don't understand. If your system was bootable from the Norton CD or any other bootable CD, then it should have been bootable for the Acronis CD. It should not have taken any special bios changes----unless you have to change the boot order every time every bootable CD is used.

[billharris44]

I've definitely got drive issues. I get that same error message if I try to run defrag from System Tools. Same thing if I run Diskeeper and try to do a drive analysis. So that's a Windows error message, not an error from True Image.

I don't think this is an issue with True Image at this point. I've got other problems that are making the program bomb out.

And I can't answer the question about the CD. It's strange, but it's not the strangest thing going on right now.

[billharris44]

SpinRite found one unrecoverable sector on the hard drive, so it's no fault of True Image. Thanks for the assistance and I'm going to go take care of that problem.