Archive verification failures in Vista

Hi,
I've spent the last two weeks investigating the cause of Acronis True Image 10 archive verification failures on my computer. My email correspondence with Acronis tech support has not lead to a solution; they appear to have given up. And I am ready to move on and try another product (Paragon Hard Disk Manager looks promising). I'm starting this thread in order to share my experiences and hopefully help move the software's development forward.

The problem:
All backup verifications fail under Vista.
All backups made from the Acronis boot CD in safe mode verify fine.
Backups made under Vista do not verify from boot CD in safe mode.
Some backups made in Windows verify in CD full mode, but some fail.
Backups made from the Acronis boot CD in full mode sometimes verify and sometimes fail.

Summary:
Vista never works.
Boot CD full version sometimes works.
Boot CD safe mode always works.

My system:
A brand new Compaq Presario SR5050NX (Pentium D 925, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB SATA HD, Windows Vista Home Premium)
Everything is stock factory configuration except that I removed Symantec Antivirus and install Microsoft OneCare antivirus. (Turning OneCare off during backup/verify made no difference.)

More info:
I ran MemTest86 v1.7 for 23 hours with 0 errors.
I ran chkdsk /r on all partitions with no errors found.
I tried different SATA cables and backing up to/from different hard drives.
The HP system diagnostic found no errors (motherboard, controller, etc.)
I ran all the reports and diagnostics, made screen shots and saved log files, and sent it all to Acronis tech support (as instructed by them) to no avail.

Well, that's it.
Dexter

 

If a successful verification is your concern, it is known that even if you get one, it could be a false positive - there are several reports of this.

So if you have the resources - spare sata laptop drive - try doing a restore and see if it works.

 

Hello indexfidelity,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Since you are already working on this issue along with Acronis Support engineers via e-mail, could you please let me know your Acronis request # which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter? I will find out how the investigation of your issue is going and try to provide you with the further instructions, if needed.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

Thanks for pointing this out, DwnNdrty.
I ran the test today: I put a new hard drive in my Presario (BTW, it's a desktop not a laptop) and restored from the Acronis boot CD. Everything worked fine--no startup problems and all partitions chkdsked OK.

 

What image did you restore? Was it one made under the Recovery CD or under Windows and did this image validate under the Recovery CD?

Since you have a successful restore, you obviously have made a good image. If it was made under the Linux environment of the Recovery CD and verified there, then something running under Windows is causing a problem either with the backup image or with the verification. What it is you may never discover, but a later build of TrueImage may solve the problem. It's also possible that it's related to a hardware driver since some of the backups fail verification in Recovery CD Full mode which loads additional drivers as well as failing in Windows which has all the drivers.

Assuming the above is correct, I'd do my future backups from the Recovery CD even though it is inconvenient. I'd like the assurance of having the backup verify successfully. Check new builds when they become available and hope for a fix.

Of course, you may decide to move on to another product, but you now have a way of successfully backing up your system which is a lot better than the alternatives you mentioned.

Thanks for posting all the problems and your successes and for using the advice you found here and reporting on the results.

 

It turns out that the archive verification failures I was getting were caused by a faulty CPU. The malfunction only showed up when doing heavy-duty compression or encryption -- otherwise the computer appeared to run fine. A good trick I learned from Paragon tech support is to download WinZip and make a large Zip file (for example, all the data on your drive) and then test it for integrity. In my case, compressing 10 GB of data would result in an average of 4 corrupted files in the resulting Zip archive. Each time I ran it different files would be reported as corrupt. None of the files actually were corrupt, it's just that the compression process would produce random errors because of my cpu malfunction. Anyway, I replaced the cpu and now WinZip, Paragon Disk Manager, Acronis TrueImage, and Norton Ghost all work fine (none of them was able to produce a valid archive with the original faulty cpu.) Strange thing is that no amount of memory testing or running of hardware diagnostics revealed any problem; it only occurred under the load of making big compressed or encrypted archives. I hope this helps somebody.

 

Hello indexfidelity,

We are glad to hear that your issue has been solved and you can use Acronis True Image successfully.

Sharing your experience is very much appreciated.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Thanks for posting your solution.

What you experienced is the Achilles heel of diagnostics - they don't run in the same manner and environment as your work.

In one of my previous lives as a system manager (non-PCs) we used to say that the best diagnostic was the OS except its error messages weren't real helpful.

It could have been a simple matter that compressing large files just heated the CPU to a critical temperature where an internal component or wire-bond went intermittent. I don't know the current situation but years ago a very common failure mode for ICs was the wire from the die to the pin header; they frequently showed up as temperature sensitive problems.