Getting a read error

I have Acronis True Image 9.0 My laptop is running XPSP2. I am trying to make a backup of my drive (approx 37GB) onto an external hard drive. When I do I get the log message:
Operation with partition "C" was terminated. Details: read error (0x70003)
Can anyone advise?
Mick

 

What I believe you have is a bad (unreadable sector) or sectors on the HD you are trying to backup. My suggestion would be to use other programs to copy all the data you can to a known good drive. Replace the bad drive, reinstall your system on the new good drive and restore your data where you copied it from. Then use Acronis to make a backup.

 

I agree, good chance you have a bad area on the disk. Do a chkdsk X: /r on all the partitions on your disk. Replace X with the drive letter of the partition being checked.

If chkdsk finds a problem with a few sectors and repairs it then try TI again. Also, run chkdsk fairly frequently and if more bad sectors are found then replace the drive - it will only get worse, not better. If there are a signigicant number of bad sectors, whatever that might be, then you probably should replace the disk right away.

Be careful with any important data files and copy them to other media as required until your have more confidence in your system.

 

If you are still in a quandry Michael. The good people at Acronis have provided a method of backing up a hard drive that has bad sectors on it. A word of caution however. If you are backing up a system hard drive with bad sectors on it, your backup may be unusable due to the fact that some of your system files may be in the bad sectors. This ability to back up a drive that does have bad sectors is very usefull though especially if you know for a fact that no important data or system files reside in the bad sectors of the disk you are trying to back up.

 

How do I do that? I would sooner make any kind of backup at present and then try to sort out my problem as I go. Sure would hate to lose my data

 

The suggestion to run chkdsk x: /r is a good one and it will give an indication of the drive’s health. I wrote a procedure for doing this, if you need/want help with it. See the image below:

 

Hi Mike, To answere your question I have to take a look at Acronis Ver 9.
I will get back to you. With Version 11 you can have Acronis skip the bad sectors of a hard disk and just back up what's good. I will check out version 9 for you because I did purchase verson 9 and I can reinstall it on one of my computers unless someone else that has version 9 already installed can check it out. I honestly forgot if verson 9 has this capability or not.

 

Hi again. I checked out ver 9 of Acronis and it appears that ver 9 does not have the capabilitiy of skipping over bad sectors. I don't know if even version 10 has the capablility but version 11 does and you may be able to download version 11 on the try basis so that you can get your backup.

How it is done is:

Run the Acronis program ver 11
Select Backup and Resore under Pick a Catagory
Select Backup
you get a welcome screen and you select continue
Select My Computer
Select Disk And Partitions
Select Drive C:\ or whichever the disk is that you are trying to back up
(don't specify any files to exclude)
Select the location where you want to put your backup
(you definately want it to go to a different drive)
Select Create a New Full Backup
Select Set Options Manually
Under Error Handling
place a check mark in the Ignore Bad Sectors box
Add comments if you wish and press Proceed
Acronis will try to make your backup by ignoring the bad sectors

 

I believe skipping bad sectors is a new feature of TI11.

 

I ran chkdsk and it fixed the problem. Backup succssful.
Many thanks to all for the timely and helpful advice.
Mick