Dive letter changes, extreame completion times and 7-days working on a solution

I have review reviewed up to p. 8 of this forum and have found similar posts that speak to my particular problem, however the operative word here is “similar.” Also, I have read the “review before you post” Again, none of the suggestions speak to my particular problem.

I am trying to recover/ clone from a verified backup, which is located on my external hard drive. The hard drive is connected to my box via a USB cable to a PCI slot connected to a new mobo. The new mobo is a Asus P5ND2 SLI with Dual Cores (3.0 GB).

I have checked the BIOS settings and they appear not to be having conflict with the way I have my drives set up as in the “Master and Slave” configuration.

This recovery process was brought about by a failed Master hard drive. The old hard drive was a Western Digital 250GB. The new hard is the same make of WD hard drive, but the drive is 360GB in size. The Slave hard drive is a Maxtor 20GB.

I have run full diagnostics on both drives resulting in non-fault outcomes on either drive.

I am not having problems booting from the ATI rescue disk or the latest build download. I have used 10.0 and 10.4942.

I have tried a great many of combinations to recover/ clone the .TIB to the correct hard drive; and therein lay the problem.

In regard to all of my attempts, only a couple of outcomes are dissimilar, but what happens time and time again is that the back up file wants to disregard the drive name configuration and write information to the wrong drive.

The ATI/ backup file is changing the drive name (not the drive letter) of the Master hard drive to the name of the slave and writing the information of the .TIB file (slave information) to the 360GB hard drive. I know this because. I did a fresh install of XP back to the C: (Master) and upon review of the files. All of the files, which at one time only resided on the D: (Slave) can now be found in the same location of the Windows folder on the C: drive.

Another way to describe this outcome is by saying the C: drive has the name of the slave, which is “sec--- ------“ the partition is 20GB (partitioned space I allocated for XP Pro) and an unallocated space of about 278GB. The D: drive has no name and a unallocated space of around 19.? GB.

In regard to the way ATI behaves. The program does not necessarily hang up but it does seem to get to a point where it seems stuck recalculating how much time it is going to take to complete. I have had completion times as high as 9-hours to 24-days, which is unacceptable.

Do you have any words or thoughts about my particular issue?

I have not contacted ATI support at this point, but plan on doing so if my efforts here do not return results. I have created the report.text for your private review.

 

Try this:
1. Disconnect the 20Gb drive.
2. Connect the new 360 gig and the usb drive.
3. Boot with the True Image CD.
4. When it boots up, choose Recover.
5. Hopefully the Recover process will let you choose the Backup Image that is on the usb drive.
6. Choose the backup Image and follow the prompts for the Recovery process.
7. When it is done, close the True Image menu, quickly remove the CD and let your system restart.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I am optimistic what you suggest will work.

 

Does anyone know how long 186.3GB should take to recover? I started the program about 10 minutes ago and I am already up to 1 day and 21 hours.

 

Extream Completion times

Now I am up to 14-days after starting the program. Yeah! Not really.

 

Restores can take much longer than backups even using exactly the same hardware. The diff is that the restore runs under linux and uses linux hardware drivers and these aren't always very good at moving data on some hardware setups. Thjis is true whether the restore is done from the bootCD or initiated under windows 9 the reboot is the computer starting up in linux).

A restore might run in about the same time as a backup or take 5 times longer (especially if a USB is involved). Only way to find out is to try one. But you should see disk activity the whole time an ATI job is running except for afew seconds at the start and a few seconds at athe end if you're backing up to a backup location. Otherwsie, if the disk activity stops for more than a few seconds, then you probably have a stalled job--if there is not disk activity for a couple of minutes then you defineitly have a stalled job.

If the restore takes way too long compared to backup time, then you can wait for the next build of ATI, which might or might not help matters. While you wait, consider making a BartPE disk or (even easier in my opinion than a BartPE disk) a VistaPE disk. Since these run the restore under Windows, it will run about as fast as a backup. In fact once, you make the VistaPE disk, you probably won't give two hoots whether a new build of ATI comes out that runs faster on the boot CD.

Search these forums for Mustang's free guide to VistaPE.

 

Thank you for your reply to this post. This morning when I woke up. I realized a new record completion time of 169-days. Yeah! Not really.

I will research what a BartPE is and do it. I might already know what a BartPE is but the acronym may be escaping me.

 

BartPE is a mini version of Windows that fits on a bootable CD, with room for some other programs like ATI. VistaPE is such a Cd made with windows, using the windws version you own or the free version available for this purpose -- see Mustang's guide.


For the BartPE , you have to identify driver files and locate theme in particlulars directories. Withthe VistaPE disk you dn't have to both with that so its much easier.

With either disk you boot into a windows OS, which you know works on your hardware, and run ATI under that but since it's running off the CD, it's not opening any ssytem files on your harddisk. They're alternatives to using ATI's boot CD, which includes linux along with ATI.