Another USB HDD Image Corruption

Hi all,

I've just bought a usb hdd enclosure, installed a WDC 80gb hdd to use as an alternative backup device. When I copy an Acronis 10 image to it and then verify the copy, it is reported as corrupted. Transfer it back to the internal dive - still corrupted. Acronis 10 boot disc also reported the USB copy corrupted. (Never had a failure when backing up and restoring to internal drives)

In the spirit of discovery, I downloaded v11 Home trial and installed it, made boot disc.

Acronis 11 in Windows (XPSP2) found USB copy corrupted, however, Acronis 11 boot verified it as OK and restored the image successfully!!

The only thing I can think of is a (USB) driver problem, as I notice that the Acronis 11 boot disc is very different from previous versions.

Faulty ram seems to get the finger pointed at it as the likely culprit, if this was so, why does the V11 boot restore?

Anybody??

Cheers

 

I would suspect that you have a USB driver/controller problem or a memory problem. Have you run memtest for at least 12 hours?

TI 11 uses a different Linux kernel. Apparently, the drivers it uses and how it accesses the USB drive allow it to work. Other changes in the program in attempts to overcome the "corrupt" image problems may also be part of it.

When using TI 11 in Windows, if you throttle back the drive transfer rate, will it validate okay?

If you had another USB hard drive, you could run tests with it and see if you get the same results. It's possible there's something with the enclosure and your computer.

 

When you boot from the v10 REscue CD and create a backup with the backup files being saved direct to the enclosure, is this backup also corrupt?

You mention "copy". How was the backup file created (windows or CD) and was the backup saved direct to the WD80 drive?

I have several drives in enclosures without problems using 10/4942 plus other builds. Some are WD80GB plus 160 & 320's without problems.

You can also try plugging the usb into a connector on the rear of case.

 

RAM is one of the possible causes but there are others as well - anything that does not permit the archive to be properly read. You could have some marginally bad RAM which is either not being used by the new Linux version in TI11 or is not being used as a critical location. As I've said before the "archive corrupt" message should be interpreted to mean "something is not allowing TI to read the archive properly" This something can be any related hardware or a problem with the TI system, especially the Linux recovery environment.

It is fairly easy to run memtest86+ to check the memory and chkdsk /r to check the disk partitions. It is a process of elimination.

 

Thanks to all who responded.
I booted to ATI 11 and made a backup of OS direct to the USB drive. Ran the validate process - OK, then restored image direct from USB HDD to boot partition - OK.

After mucking about for several hours, making images and moving them across to the USB drive, every image failed validation on the USB drive. However, I took a few punts and tried to restore the failed images thru' Windows and boot disc and all tried restored successfully.

I found a checksum program - Fastsum - and the process of copying images and a couple of long video's to the USB drive, all failed the checksum, although the videos still worked fine.

Another thing was to make an image to my usual location on an internal drive and immediatley after make another image to the USB drive. The first thing I noticed was that the file sizes of the 2x images were different?

I ran memtest for a few hours a couple of months ago and there were no errors, but I haven't ran it again for this situation.

System:
AMD 4200 x2, MSI K8N-SLI
4x 512 DDR400
WDC 320 Sata drives

Weird - I suspect that the MSI m/b USB support is sus, however I think I'll give up on USB HDD's! - at least until I can afford major upgrade and a name brand USB enclosure or a NAS.

Cheers

 

It seems like something is indeed marginal where it works in certain situations.

Have you tried:
Different USB ports - especially try the ones at the rear of the machine. There is about 18" less cable compared to using front mounted ports.

Different USB cable to drive?

The filesizes could be slightly different since who knows what Windows has created/deleted when it is running but the difference should be fairly small, whatever that means!