GMAL-04 Error

[dickcu]

Has anyone yet figured out a solution to the GMAL-04 Error which prevents you from booting to any other snapshot other than the one you're in. I've Defragged, run DskChk and uninstalled and reinsalled First Defense with no luck. I see this error goes back to 2006 and I still can't find a solution online. Does anyone have an answer? Thanks so much!

[stapp]

The error GMAL-04 if for NR Buffer Overflow. NR(Non-Resident) records optimize the storage requirements and reduce the I/O overhead in NTFS. In this case, the number of non-resident MFT attributes has exceeded what can be stored in the buffer. It is likely that the internal MFT attribute buffer overflows first. Windows should be migrating these NR records out of the MFT, but rarely something in Windows causes the system to get to alarming levels before responding.

Sadly, the legacy FD-ISR is unable to handle this situation. I wish I had better news

This was posted by Todd (Leapfrog Software) in this thread

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=304596

Other than that perhaps someone else may have some more ideas.

[dickcu]

Thanks for the quick reply Stapp. What I've done as I mentioned before is DiscCheck, defragged with Perfect Disk to no avail. Then reformatted the C-Drive. Started from scratch and everything was normal. Then when I tried to copy over the archived that caused this problem it booted to it but couldn't fully load. Using Acronis True Image I put all the original snapshots back and had the same GMAL error problem. Guess it's time to go to System Restore and Acronis for backup. I've been a FD-ISR user from the beginning and dread giving it up...scary. My many thanks for this program goes out to Todd at Leapfrog!!

[starfish_001]

it is pain that you have this error but still no reason to give up FD ISR.


I had this again shortly after I went to Windows 8. I don't think there is a formula to fix this but luck is invloved no doubt but

this fixed it for me

• Disk check
• Defrag - perfect disk
• CCleaner or http://privazer.com/

I had to delete a snapshot and restore one from an archive

[dickcu]

I appreciate your interest in helping me very much but I had done all those things with the exception of cCleaner but I don't think this was a registry problem from what Todd and others are saying. However, yesterday I found an Acronis image I'd made in January...copied it over and everything's now back to normal. I have First Defense BACK!! Files have been updated from another backup and I'm totally back where I was.

[starfish_001]

cc deletes junk out of the MFT as does privaser - that relates very well to your problem

[dickcu]

Thanks for the info Starfish. I'm good now but should it ever happen again I'll try both of those. Appreciate the help!

[JW Clements]

Not saying that the problem was PerfectDisk in your case but, after years of them coding to play nice with FD, they scrapped that and their V 12 modified the MBR so that FD could only boot into the last active snapshot. I used ShadowProtect to recover an image with PerfectDisk V 11 and MBR and everything was OK.
After spending way too much time trying to find out why, they said that a new feature, to allocate new file writes to a larger free space which would reduce the fragmentation for a given file, was the cause and if I installed V 12 without that feature, FD would be OK. I didn't bother, I wasn't going to take the chance that they'd make the 'feature' mandatory rather than optional in a future release, I stayed with V 11 until I switched to all SSDs and don't need to defrag.

J

You can search these forums for the posts that I made to warn other FD users.