TI 8 stopped working

I've used TI8 for years. I was afraid to upgrade to TI9 because of the hundreds and hundreds of bugs reported on this forum when it was first released.
TI 8 worked until this week, though. Now, when I try to start to create an image, it goes to a "scanning drives" screen and hangs with an hour-glass cursor. I have to use Task Manager to kill it.

I changed Xandros to Linspire on one partition, and that changed the boot manager from LILO to GRUB, but TI8 DID WORK OK in creating a couple of incremental images after that. Now, it won't do anything without hanging on the "scanning drives" screen.

My main operating system where TI8 is installed is XP Pro, SP2, completely updated. I almost never boot to Linux.
I didn't have the latest build of TI 8, so I did upgrade to the latest available (937, if memory serves), and that upgrade installed just fine, but it still hangs on "scanning drives."

Any suggestions?

Ron

 

Is there an external drive connected? If so, try without it, and if that helps, try connecting it to some other port (possibly on the back panel), avoiding any hubs. You may also have too many other USB devices connected along with the USB drive.

 

Hi Ron,

In Help About does it now show the build number as 937 ? If not an add/remove programs uninstall is called for followed by a reinstall of 937.

Xpilot

 

Thanks very much for the reply. There is no external drive. There are no USB devices connected at all.

 

It says "build 937."
Would you advise uninstalling and starting all over again, anyway? I kind of dread that because I originally purchased True Image at version 6 or 7, and I think I'd have to install one of those first before I could install my version 8 which is an upgrade. I'm not sure that I can even lay hands on the original version.
I'd love an explanation as to why this program suddenly started crashing.

Ron

 

Hello Ron,

No guarantee but often a straightforward reinstall of TI can fix the sort of problem you reported. If that doesn't work then it's worth checking for bad sectors by running the command chkdsk X: /r on each partition in turn (where X equals the letter of the partition being tested).

Regards

 

Sometimes, the message box that TI8 displayed after asking it to start to create an image seemed to hang on "analyzing partition 2-3." That was the Freespire Linux partition formatted in Reiser FS. TI never had a problem with it previously, but, as I noted, I'd recently changed that Linux OS from Xandros to Freespire. I therefore deleted the entire partition and deleted GRUB. Alas, TI8 still hung at the same spot, this time displaying "E:" in it's message box when it hung up.
I ran chkdsk to detect bad sectors. None detected; no joy.

In despair, I therefore uninstalled TI8 and reinstalled build 937. It can verify images and mount them to recover files (as it could before the reinstallation), but it STILL locks up immediately with an hour-glass cursor as soon as the "Next" button is clicked in the "Create Image Wizard." Secure Zone has never been activated/installed.

There was no new software installed on this computer after TI8 last worked correctly, and it's been working with this hardware setup since 2001 (various versions of TI)

What could possibly make this previously-reliable software stop working?

 

If it's of any further help to anyone, I've found that anything in TI that requires it to analyze partitions will result in a crash. CPU usage goes to 100% and if the TrueImage.exe process isn't killed soon enough, it can eventually freeze the entire computer.
Trying to schedule a task causes TI to crash because the first step is constructing a list of partitions and drives from which the user chooses.
Create-an-image crashes because the first step is constructing a list of partitions and drives.
Exploring an image works just fine because TI doesn't seem to have to create a list of partitions and drives -- just a directory tree from which the TIB files are chosen.

I've run thorough chkdsk scans on all the drives and there's not a problem.

Once and only once, TI showed a dialog box stating something like "sector 4,7xx is unreadable." I was given the option to skip, skip all, or retry. Unwisely, I chose retry. TI crashed, and I've never seen that dialog box again.

Norton Ghost 9 is working like a charm on this computer. I've tried killing all it's processes along with those of Zone Alarm, the antivirus, and Spy Sweeper, and it makes no difference.

There's some problem with one of the partitions or logical drives that makes TI crash, but I cannot discover what it is. Whatever it is, it does not affect the function of the OS or Norton Ghost.

Any clues here?

 

Have you also Norton GoBack installed?

If you have, you may want to have a look at the section before last in the FAQ.

 

Thanks for the response, but the anser is "No, definitely not." GoBack has never touched any of my machines.

I now have Steve Gibson's SpinRite 6 running. The boot drive with the system partition, an extended partition, and some unused space has tested perfect. I'm in the process of testing the other HD where TI image files are stored. It's large, and it'll take SpinRite 12 hours to finish it. I'll post here if it turns up any problems.