Please HELP!Corrupt .tib file

IAbout a month ago, before formating my main hardrive i created a image of my hardrive on to my external USB harddrive .There is about 38 slices stored on my usb harddrive.i reinstaled new windows on my main compute harddrive, and the slices were working fine i could explore then i cound mount them, everything , till two days ago ....all my 38 slices have reduced to 0kb exept one No33 which is 800 Mb,and once i try to open them it comes up with a msg:
an error occured while opening archive:
Archive is invalid or its type is unsuported
Tag=0x582229ab74ef6533
Cannot open archive for reading
The file is corrupted

PLEASE help!!! i dont kow what to do this is the only copy of 10 years of work, i tought i could trust beckup files, there were working fine two days ago, how can all 37 of them reduce to 0kb, from 4Gb

I am using xp Media center edition SP2
acroins true image home 10
Please help!

 

I can tell you what might of happened, and that so long as you don't try to write anything more to the harddrive, recovery may be possible.

I would guess that either the partition table within the MBR has become corrupted (if your drive is no longer reporting itself with the correct size, this is a possibility) or the root directory is reporting nonsense.

It is possible with knowledge and disk editing software to repair these errors, however, I'm not the man to ask to do this.

Another possible reason and the one I'd check first, is that the new installation of XP will have a different SID (Security Identifier) to the one that made your image. It might be that just adding the image files to your user permissions, will bring the files back to life.

If the SID is incorrect, XP will report these as 0kb files, but normally gives you an error message to the effect that you don't have permission to access the file.

With XPpro this is easy to do, I'm not so sure about the Media centre version.

Boot XP into SAFE mode and right click one of the 0kb folders. Choose 'Sharing and Security', click on the Security tab, then on ADVANCED.

On the PERMISSIONS tab click ADD and then add your current user name to the list. Make sure you have the two tick boxes at the bottom of the form ticked.

Once XP has finished adding the file(s) to your new SID, reboot XP and see if your files have come alive.

If not you're back to a corrupted harddrive problem above.

Colin

Just had a thought, what happens if you boot using the recovery CD are the files then visible?

 

Thank you so much for your help ill go and try to do that now.

 

When i boot from a CD its a same thing-0kb...(error msg The selected file is not an Acronis*True*Image*Home archive.)

 

Have you tried reading this USB drive on a different computer?

If this is important stuff that is valuable, I'd pay for a professional company to recover the data from the drive. It may cost one or two thousand dollars for the recovery, but if you use the drive and try to correct it yourself, you may make the data unrecoverable. Even CHKDSK /R can cause problems. Hoever, CHKDSK with no switches only reads the drive and doesn't write anything.

Definitely, do not write anything to the drive!!! It's not likely that you will harm the drive by just trying to read from it on another computer or from the Acronis TI Recovery CD, but any write may destroy your data.

Oh yes, when you get the data back, make more than one backup. One USB drive is only one backup even if there are several backups stored on the drive. That's one of the basic rules of backups.

 

Hello Monkey14,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that bodgy and jmk94903 are most likely correct. It looks like a filesystem corruption.
Please notice that you can sometimes get some of the data from a corrupted image archive by mounting it (after repairing the filesystem). Please refer to the respective User's Guide for instructions.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov