A backup of a defect Drive WORKS too, ALL FILES COULD ONLY BE RESTORED FROM THE IMAGE

I felt I had to report this success because other people might benefit from it as we did !

We had a damaged disk which had dropped to the floor. Windows could not read it anymore. Made an Acronis image of the disk in hopes that I might see some files in the image (but as you can expect of a TRUE IMAGE, it could not). Making the image took some 2 hours, because there were sectors containing unreadable parts and the disk was clicking and clicking - repositioning its heads I assume. But the image succeeded!

After trying the evaluation package of R-studio demo (a restore utility) which could see and restore data on the damaged disk at that time, I bought R-Studio. But later the same day that I had tried the evaluation package R-Studio Demo, suddenly Windows surprised me with a horrible message that "Windows was unable to save all the data for the file Device\HarddiskVolumexxx\", which later turned out to have corrupted the disk even more so that when the full version of R-Studio arrived it was unable to see any usable partitions at all!

Then only a few days later I realised I had made this "True Image" of the disk and I mounted this image and ran R-Studio: AND ALL FILES COULD BE RESTORED FROM THAT IMAGE , WHEREAS THEY COULD NOT BE RESTORED FROM THE ORIGINAL HD ANYMORE! Can you imagine how surprised I was about the potential this software, that it could make an image even of a disk which was corrupted so that the OS could not see the contents of the partitions anymore (and which was constantly clicking and clicking while the software was trying to access it)?

I was also curious:Is there anyone out there with similar experiences ?

 

Yes !
I have had sucess in retrieving data from broken computers using True Image.

One example was an old Winows 98 computer where the user had tried to install XP over the top ignoring all the warnings that the hardware was not suitable. The result was an unbootable mess.
The user was desperate to recover his Office data, Contacts,email etc. So without trying any sort of repair I booted with a TI CD and made a full image of the whole drive. The image took an hour or so as the old computer only had USB 1 and the ignore button had to be used frequently.

Not only was all the desired data recoverable from the image but to my surprise the installation files for MS Office were there as well. I copied all that was usable to CDs which he then installed to his replacement XP computer.

Xpilot

 

Re: A backup of a defect Drive WORKS too, ALL FILES COULD ONLY BE RESTORED FROM THE I

Thanks for your post. If there are more reports to come here, it might be a nice idea to collect them and to have a list of 'user solved problems' (with eventual tips and tricks), which are a bit beyond the regular backup/restore, somewhere on the Acronis site itself ?

 

OK... let me see if my situation is suitable for a similar result.

I have an EIDE 160 GB Maxtor HD running Windows XP Pro. Recently, I have been unable to boot into Windows and am given the error : "Windows cannot find HAL.DLL or it is corrupt... " and will not proceed. I've tried repairing with Windows boot disk, but get read-errors and will not proceed. I tried to clone with Ghost 2003 and get a "Read sector failure" and it will not proceed (I understand that there is a flag that can be used on Ghost to ignore sector errors, but before I tried that I wanted to educate myself a little more on the issue and I found Acronis and subsequently this forum )

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I had already purchased a SATA 300 GB Maxtor drive with the intention of upgrading... but as fate would have it, my current HD crashed before I did.

I am in desperate need to get my data off that drive and absolutely DO NOT want to reinstall XP and all my apps/settings/preferences etc...

So, is True Image the program I am looking for? If so, what would be the procedure you would recommend for my situation? Should I clone the drive to an "image" on the new drive and then restore back to another good drive? Will TI support IDE -> SATA? Should I simply "clone" the drive? Will the bad sector information get cloned as well? I am considering getting a second 300GB SATA drive and utilizing my HW RAID chip to do data-striping, so getting another drive is possible.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Matt

 

If you were able to mount the image, TrueImage was able to read that image. That's a requirement for mounting.

Did you try just looking for your files in the image before using R-Studio?

 

I don't know if this qualifies, but a colleague's laptop drive started to give trouble and the first indication was a message from SMART that the drive was going bad. Sometimes it would boot up sometimes it would not. I ran Spinrite on it and it too confirmed that the drive was in imminent danger of crashing. I quickly made a Backup Image of the entire drive using the bootable Rescue CD while a new drive was on its way.
When I installed the new drive and Recovered the image to it, the Recovery was a complete success.

 

Re: A backup of a defect Drive WORKS too, ALL FILES COULD ONLY BE RESTORED FROM THE I

Yes I did and (as can be expected of 'a true image') I got exactly the same problems as with the drive itself. And that was the reason for trying R-Studio.

 

Re: A backup of a defect Drive WORKS too, ALL FILES COULD ONLY BE RESTORED FROM THE I

Just as TI has its place in the toolkit, so does R-Studio. I have them both installed onto a BartPE disk for those "deep-****" moments.

F.

 

Re: A backup of a defect Drive WORKS too, ALL FILES COULD ONLY BE RESTORED FROM THE I

OK, I thought that was what you said, but I am impressed that the mounted image fooled R-Studio into thinking it was a real disk that could be repaired. It's a nice solution.

 

Glad it seemed to work, yet I should be a little wary about this recovery : have you been able to check that your files are not corrupt. You might have a mix of correct files and corrupted files and no easy way to know which are OK and which are not.

 

Re: A backup of a defect Drive WORKS too, ALL FILES COULD ONLY BE RESTORED FROM THE I

I also have R-Studio and would like to know how to add it to the BartPE disk. Would you share this via a PM, unless you think others here might benefit. I have BartPE together with the Acronis ver 9 plug-in.

 

Re: A backup of a defect Drive WORKS too, ALL FILES COULD ONLY BE RESTORED FROM THE I

I will contact you via PM Ralphie. I am happy to share this but we are outside the scope of this forum so if anyone else needs more info feel free to PM me.

F.