Would not restore! Not a valid image?>?

Help....

Restore my faith in ATI
Recently had a catostrophic failure of one of my drives..... OK, I had an image that was less than a week old, that I HAD VERIFIED to be OK...on a second internal harddrive
Also had a copy of the same image on an external drive... also VERIFIED!

Used the Acronis boot CD and any time I tried to access the image I was left with the message that it was not a valid ATI Image....

whether I tried to restore or even use the boot CD to verify....

I have since brought my computer back to live with no help from Acronis....

one of the first things I did was to verify the image while running windows....
and it passed....
Yet it will not work with the boot CD...

So....what went wrong....
So...what good is backup if it can't restore

this was my first attempt at a restore after using Ghost for years.........

Please advise....

 

You always need to test the EXACT environment and sequence of events that you will need to follow in order to restore an image.

What you need to do is test that you will be able to restore from the Linux boot disk. If you cannot do that then come back to the Forum and we will take it from there.

 

Based on your description of your use of TI I don't think this is your problem but easy to check.

TI changed engines and the format of archive tib files somewhere around build 3625. If your image was created with a later version and you try to restore with a boot CD that contains an older build it will give that error.

The CD should always be created from the installed build so the versions match.

There is a current problem with the Intel 965 chipset which might cause this problem although it usually results in drives not being seen.

 

Either copy the image to a second internal hard drive or take the hard drive from your external enclosure and mount it in your machine as a slave drive and restore from there. The Linux rescue environment is picky about USB chip sets. Another choice is to build a BartPE disk http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ and use one of Mustang's plugins http://www.mechrest.com/plugins/. The first two choices are faster.

 

Huh?

I made a backup within Windows.... and tried to restore with the emergency CD (made with the same version installed)

IF this doesn't work, then what is the purpose of the program....

confused


as for copying the image...
I do have the original on an internal harddrive and that doesn't work either

 

Apologies if my post was unclear.

I understand what you did. What you did not do is first test that it would work. The ATI boot CD uses a subset of Linux as the OS. Drivers are needed to enable an OS to communicate with the hardware components. There is absolutely no guarantee that the Linux kernel contains the necessary drivers to enable it to communicate with your particular hardware configuration.

In order to help you we need to determine at exactly what point things go wrong. It is not possible to determine this from your post. If you can be more specific and give a step-by-step of what you did and the exact wording of the error message(s) then it is likely that someone on this Forum will be able to provide a solution.

The bottom line is that it is unlikely that you have done something wrong or that there is a problem with ATI. It is much more likely that this is purely a communications issue which (hopefully) can be resolved.

 

What is the filename of the image files? They must have a .tib extension at the end and should not contain any periods other than the one before the tib extension just to be on the safe side.

 

What Version and build number of TI are you running? We can help more if we know this.
Try validating the image on both drives from the boot disk.

 

Welll....It gets weirder

what happen is I made an image to another internal drive...
With ATI 10

I then needed to restore the drive due to a failure.
Booted the system the Boot CD created with V10 and when I attempted a recovery or even a validtation...I was able to navigate to either drive that had my images on them
when I chose the image file
I was greeted with a message saying the file is not a valid image and thats it...


BUT, I just created a new rescue CD... same version... nothing different...and it appears to be working......

so maybe there was something wrong with my bootable CD??
again it was made with the same version!

Yikes.....

I'll try some more tests and report back

 

How about answering my question about the version and build number. If you navigate to the drive with the image using windows explorer, please post the exact file name of your image file. When you say you attempted to restore with V10, did you mean the TRIAL Version. If so you can create an image wit the TRIAL version but you can't Restore with it.

 

Hi there seekforever,

I guess it depends what you mean by "somewhere around" . The imaging engine changed with Build 3567 (Build 3625 introduced direct to DVD imaging).

Regards

 

Full version 10, build 4871


name of file is 1203.tib

(i named it the date I created it)

 

Hello Tom,

Sorry but I must correct you there. The trial version can Create and Restore images under Windows during the 14 days trial period. However, using the Acronis bootable rescue CD, you cannot Create images but you can Restore TI images created under Windows indefinitely.

Regards

 

What you are describing is unusual. Restoring a verified image from an internal hard drive is normally not a problem. The failure is probably due to a driver difference between Windows and the Linux recovery environment. Tracking this down will be more likely with the following information:
What is your hardware setup?
Motherboard (or PC Brand) and chipset?
IDE or SATA hard drives?
If SATA what chipset?
Do you use a RAID configuration?
Is there anything unusual about your system?
Have you disconnected all USB devices before trying the restore?

An alternative as already mentioned is to create a Bart's PE boot disk. This will be able to use the Windows drivers for recovery.

 

That is why you need to test before D-Day (as in Disaster-Day)

And keep testing. CD's are not the most reliable of media. Once a week just boot from the CD and make sure that everything is the way you expect it to be. This takes less than 5 minutes and gives you the reassurance that things will be under control should you need them.

Glad to hear that there has been a positive outcome.

 

I must bow to Menorcaman's far superior knowledge.