Error During Scheduled Backups

I am trying to schedule monthly differential and daily incremental backups. When I manually made my first full backup I got the error:

Failed to read data from the disk.
Failed to read from the sector 3,312,847 of the hard disk 1: Retry/Ignore/ignore All/Cancel

I assumed this was some file locked by the OS and told the backup to ignore it. Now however, whenever either of my two scheduled backups run they hit the same error and halt waiting for user input. No user is there so it sits and waits.

My questions are these:

• Should I determine definitively what is at that NTFS sector to ensure my assumption about it being a locked OS file is correct? If so, how? (I've Googled all over the place for a way to tell me what file contains that sector.)

or

• Is there an Acronis backup setting I can adjust so that errors are ignored (as if I were there to tell it to do so)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

John

 

Hi John

Have you run chkdsk?

If not then I suggest that you run chkdsk. Click Start > Run and type chkdsk X:/r .... where "X" is the drive letter of the partition that you want to check.

 

Hi Tabvla.

Thanks for your reply.

Though I've owned it for awhile, I decided to begin using Acronis when Windows backup failed me miserably after a disk crash and system rebuild from scratch. During that install I let the XP Pro installer do a full format on the replacement drive. After the base OS was on I made a full "vanilla" snapshot with Acronis. I hit this error even on that backup. (And every differential and incremental backup I've attempted since has of course believed whatever file the error is in needed to be backed up so it reoccurs each time.)

After your post I went and did the full chkdsk and it indicated no errors were found.

I wonder if it could be some file the OS has locked (e.g. the swap file?), and that I will always get this? Of course you would think that situation would have been handled by Acronis, so I'm probably wrong.

If there was someway I could map the sector to the file itself (if this were the old FAT system I'd know how to!), I could either try and fix the error or exclude the file.

Thanks!

John

 

Hi John

Because Backup/Restore is such a critical process, one would always prefer if there were no errors - real or not. This may be a real error or it may be a false alarm. But there is really no way of knowing.

The only useful advice that I can give you is what I would do if it were my system.

The cost of a hard disk is minimal compared to the loss of data or spending hours (even days) of my time trying to sort out a problem. I would therefore do the following: -

• Purchase a new disk
• Create an image of the System partition using the "Image" method
• Create an image of the data files using either the "Image" or the "Files & Folders" method
• Install the new disk (refer to Microsoft's guidlines)
• Restore the System image to the new disk, including the MBR. Change the size of the partition so as to ensure that if it is a bad sector that it will not be "imaged" back to the new disk which will then simply recreate the problem. Changing the size of the partition, even by a small amount will eliminate this potential problem
• Remove the old disk and try to boot from the new disk
• When everything is working correctly and all data has been restored then reformat the old disk

 

That shouldn't be the case. It's more likely a sector read-error. Sorry to ask the obvious but did you run chkdsk with the option to scan for bad sectors? Other file errors might not show up with checkdsk but you could still have a bad sector. You need to to scan the sectors to be sure they can be read.

 

Hello johnaparker,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

First of all, please make sure you use the latest build of the appropriate version of Acronis True Image. To get access to updates you should first register your software.

If you already use the latest build and the issue still persists, please download the latest version of Acronis drivers, unpack the archive, install unpacked MSI package and see if the problem persists.

If the issue persists, please do the following:

- Replace C:\WINDOWS\system32\snapapi.dll with the one from the downloaded SnapAPI archive;

- Reproduce the issue and collect the log file;

- Get the log file without closing any application windows (including the error message windows if there are any). The log file will be created at C:\ . The name of the log file will be snapapi [date-time].log

Please also create Acronis Report and Windows System Information as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov