Problem Restoring with Drive Snapshot

No Brian, the last thing my son did the night before the issue arose was Windows Updates (which included the NVIDIA driver). Upon booting up Sunday morning he encountered the 'Welcome to Black (screen)'. He brought it to my attention and I restarted his PC a few times only to experience the same issue every time! That's when I attempted the first of a few DS restores of his system (C) partition. I still cannot understand why those DS restores did not remedy the problem by restoring the original video driver.

But Froggie hit the nail on the head and 'all's well that ends well'.

G'night.

 

Wendi,

I'm still confused as you said "No Brian" and then you said you did restore images. I assume those images were created prior to the Windows Update. So they should have worked, but didn't. Correct?

 

Hi Wendi,

it is a serious DS bug that reappeared after a long time. Why/how it is caused: DS does not lock properly the system partition when it restores and the file table is not correctly flashed/cleared; so the partition after the restoration has inconsistency between the real placement of the files and how they reflect inside the file table.
Actions to take:
1st. perform a chkdsk to repair the file table.
2nd. report it to DS developers ASAP.

ps. depending on when the bug appeared and if you have taken images/snapshots afterwords it would mean that those images are problematic too, since DS relies to the file table to take a snapshot. You can only realise it, if/when you or a program opens a file affected or as in your case if the OS tries to load a dll or driver and that file results corrupted.

Panagiotis

 

Panagiotis,

That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.

 

Hi Brian,

you are welcome. By the way if you want to "play" and see first hand the consequences you can easily do it with "Image for Windows" by forcing a restoration on the unlocked partition of the system; after the reboot it will cause a BSOD which most of the time (but not always) can be easily fixed by running a chkdsk.

Panagiotis

 

@Wendi

for verifying if your images are ok you should either restore them on another disk/partition or mount them as virtual drives and perform a chkdsk on them. If the chkdsk report is clean they are ok, if it says that it found problems that need to be fixed you should ditch them to avoid future problems.

Panagiotis

 

Panagiotis, not being familiar with DS' inner workings, it sounds like you're saying when the LIVE image is taken, an improper LOCK was used on the System partition (I guess they don't use VSS), most likely due to their own proprietary LOCK mechanism (kinda like IFW's PhyLock). This provided for an inconsistent FileSystem in the taken image... yes?

I'm suprised this hasn't come up in quite a while with the product.

 

Hi frogie

No, the problem is not in the backup (DS uses VSS by default and automatically falls back to its own driver only if VSS fails), but in the restore.
When it restores using the native API it should unmount the system partition before starting the restore. In Wendi's case it failed to unmount the system partition and started restoring with the partition mounted = lead in corruption of the file table (old file table gets merged with the new file table).

Panagiotis

 

Thanks, Panagiotis! I asked the question because Wendi mentioned that both restore attempts, both the DOS automatic that used the Native NT API and the WinPE-based restore failed. With WinPE, the System volume is normally not mounted when the process starts (unless some other process has mounted it for some reason).

Maybe there's a coupla issues here...

 

Brian, sorry that I confused you - I misread your question...

My response should have been... "Of course, why would I do otherwise?"

 

Thanks for your insight into this issue!

 

Frog, I apologize if I said or implied that I performed a WinPE-based restore; in fact, I did not. I just initiated the DS restore process from within Win7, where DS restarts the PC into DOS to do the actual restore.

 

No apology necessary... I looked back through the thread and found no reference to a WinPE DS restoration. I have no idea why I made that assumption... the apology is mine

I'm very glad your son's System is now working fine.

I am surprised that HP never supported W7 in a 2011 vintage System

Can you give me the make'n'Model of that HP system? I'll see what I can dig up.

 

So, Wendi... how does it feel to be the family IT Support person (I have that issue as well)

 

Froggie, my son has an HP Compaq Presario SR5130NX. SIW identifies the video card/chip as an NVIDIA geForce 6100 nForce 430. His PC originally came with Windows Vista x86, but was upgraded to Windows 7 SP1 x86 a couple of months after we bought it.

 

Well I'm the PC-literate member of the family so I inherited the job by default. On the other hand my son teaches me everything I need to know about using an iPhone!