Odd Image Behavior (could be me)

[cybrguy]

I have been using TI 9 for a couple years, and have rarely restored an image. I was just moving some old images to another backup drive and out of curiosity double-clicked one of the images. My guess was that it would mount an image so that I could look thru it. It started to bring up the TI program, and then started throwing errors like "Failed to read from the sector 63 of the hard disk 3". It gives several similar errors than brings up the "Restore Data Wizard".
This behavior concerned me, so I checked a couple of my other saved images and they behaved the same way when double-clicked. Yet, if I 'validate" any of the images using the TI tool they show fine.
Is this behavior normal and I am just using an inappropriate method of accessing the backups, or do I have a problem with my images?

[Ralphie]

The Validation process is know for giving false positives. The only way to be 100% sure your Images will Restore successfully is to actually do a Restore to a spare hard drive.

[cybrguy]

Thanks, Raphie, but my question really is, should double-clicking an image bring up the restore image wizard without throwing any errors, or is there something wrong with all the images I have created?

[seekforever]

Originally Posted by cybrguy

... It started to bring up the TI program, and then started throwing errors like "Failed to read from the sector 63 of the hard disk 3". It gives several similar errors than brings up the "Restore Data Wizard".
This behavior concerned me, so I checked a couple of my other saved images and they behaved the same way when double-clicked. Yet, if I 'validate" any of the images using the TI tool they show fine.
...

I think the issue here is just where is the problem. When you double click on a tib file it brings up a TI screen with "Analyzing partition" at the bottom. The question is: Is the partition being analyzed within the image file or is it on the physical HDs in the machine? I don't know but there is a chance if all your images do this that it is the current HD not the image.

Suggest you run chkdsk X: /r on ALL your HD partitions substituting the drive letter of the partition being tested for X. It will need to reboot to do C.

Validating an image means that it calculates the same checksum as was calculated when the image was created thus the file is being read correctly. However, one could imagine the scenario where bad data was presented to the TI program at image creation time, it was included in the checksum calculation but now when it wants to "analyze" the partition it isn't happy with the bad data. In other words, TI copied the sector faithfully but it contained garbage.

[cybrguy]

I have another external backup drive that has some older images on it, and they seem to be throwing the same error from a double-click. All the images can't be bad unless TI from the beginning was defective, thru a couple versions. That isn't very likely, so something else must be wrong.
If you d-click an image, wherever you may keep it, do you get any errors? I seem to recall this working in the past...

[seekforever]

Originally Posted by cybrguy

...
If you d-click an image, wherever you may keep it, do you get any errors? I seem to recall this working in the past...

See my previous post and to be more explicit, the answer is no, it says analyzing partitions and then starts up in the wizard.

Check your current system. Do they all say sector 63? Sector 63 may be the last sector mapped to the boot track but some of this is legacy and chasing it up may not be worth the bother.

[cybrguy]

OK. "Hard Drive 3" from the error message must have been the new storage (backup) external drive that that I had just added prior to running into this issue. After removing it and replacing it (it is USB) I am no longer getting the error. It had just (last night) been added to the system, and I may not have removed and replaced it since it's original conversion from FAT32 to NTFS, so the system may not have been able to recognize it is it's current configuration.

Sorry about the thread, folks. User error. Glad it's not my backups... ;-)

[seekforever]

Originally Posted by cybrguy

...
Sorry about the thread, folks. User error. Glad it's not my backups... ;-)

No need to be sorry. I now know that the analyzing partitions means it is analyzing the PC's partitions not the partitions in the backup. Also, the problem was a bit obscure and now we know what can cause that error. Learned something.

[cybrguy]

Cool-. Then we BOTH learned something. :-)

[dantz]

Originally Posted by Ralphie

The Validation process is know for giving false positives.

Validation "false positives"? Are you implying that there may be an error in the way the validation checksums are calculated and/or compared? This would be a very serious problem.

Or is that just a catch-all phrase meaning something along the lines of "We don't know why your restore (or whatever) went bad. It validated OK!"

[Ralphie]

There are many users here who report that their images validate fine but do not Restore correctly. And I've read also the opposite where there are validate errors but the Restore is okay. So as the commercial goes, "Who you're gonna call". It could be hardware peculiarities so you just have to find out what works for you.