Extracted files are corrupt ??

Hi All,

I have just recently tested Acronis as an alternative to Norton Ghost and at the moment am not too thrilled, but maybe I am doing something wrong

I created the rescue boot media, then imaged my NTFS (winxp) drive to my external USB drive. All fine so far.

Then verified the image. Still all good.

Rebooted back into windows and explored the image (mounted as a virtual drive letter) .. I was able to browse and see all the files in the image. Still all good.

BUT .....

When trying to "EXTRACT" individual files from this image, they are ALL corrupt. RAR files wont open (says the file is corrupt), I can't view any text documents (corrupt) and all my photo album images ... you guessed it ... CORRUPT !!!

Can anyone fill me in as to what is going on ? Any information would be greatly appreciated. I knew things were going too good to be true *sigh*


Cheers,
Archie

 

Hello Archie,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please do the following in order to check out the integrity of the image and files in it:

- Download and unpack the checksum utility from http://www.acronis.com/files/support/xcsc.zip
- Copy the image file from the USB drive to the internal drive;
- Run the checksum utility and click on the ellipsis sign to browse and select image on the USb drive;
- Click the "Start" button and save the MD5 checksum after the calculation is complete;
- Get the MD5 checksum of the same image on the internal drive and compare it with the one from the USB drive.

Also please perform the same operation for the file on the mounted image and for the one you copied from the image.

Please let us know the results.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hi there, Thanks for such a quick reply

Here are the MD5 checksum results:

* image (*.tib) file on local disk - 1D3E83D5249E96822F31462BC44EC275

* image (*.tib) file on USB disk - 1D3E83D5249E96822F31462BC44EC275

-------

* file on mounted image:

MD5 Checksum = A486F58C93135D58BD2BDBC2C354D867

* file on local disk (restored from mounted image) :

MD5 Checksum = A486F58C93135D58BD2BDBC2C354D867


The file I restored from the "tib" image to my local drive was a Winrar file. And when I try to open the file, I get the error message:

[! C:\documents.rar: The file "" header is corrupt]

And as previously stated, I can't successfully open/view any files, be it images, rar, zip or documents from either the image (mounted on a logical drive) or if i extract/copy the files from the mounted image to my local drive


Hope this information helps. I look forward to hearing your thoughts


Cheers,
Archie

 

P.S. I just tried viewing some text files (small in size) and some small gif files which i restored from the mounted image.......and they worked ok ??

But when i tried viewing some larger JPG's and BMP's ( >500kb) they are either not viewable (totally corrupt) or you can see visible corruption (horizontal lines) across the BMP's

I also have a Windows Media file (WMV) which is un-playable both from the mounted image....and if restored to the local drive

I hope I am not confusing you with this information. Sorry


Cheers,
Archie

 

Hi archie,

Do you have the MD5 checksum for the original file (the non-corrupt RAR-file ??) on your local disk?

Which of the images did you mount? The one on the external disk, or the copy on the internal disk?

 

Hi Minimax,

Original file checksum = E4AE400F31A076646C3896E2D5EBEEA0

I mounted the tib file from both the external disk and the local disk. Both ways produce corrupt restored files

Thanks for helping out


Cheers,
Archie

 

Small progress - we now know that the file extracted from the image is truely corrupt, since we have checksum mismatch.

And we know that you can correctly copy a large TIB file from the external drive to the internal drive, since the TIB checksums matches.

And since the TIB's are identical, it is not surprising that the file checksum are identical.

Could you do another test? Create a new TIB, but this time write it to the internal disk? Then copy the TIB to the external drive, and post the TIB checksums for both copies?

 

I only have one internal HDD, partioned as NTFS ..... and i can't create an image on the same drive that i want to image

What now ?

 

Can't? As in the program won't allow it, or as in there is not enough space on the HD to do it?

 

Program won't allow it

 

Hello archie,

Do you get the error message when you try to create image on the internal hard drive? What the error message did you get?

Thank you.
--
Irina Shirokova

 

It says you can't create the image on the same partition that you want to backup (or words to that effect)

We are getting off track though I think ...

I have read countless reviews and seen the bizillion awards which have been given to your software. Is there somebody there who can resolve my original issue ? I was thoroughly impressed with everything about the software, up until I tried to restore a file from the image i created. Can someone please tell me why ?

*frustrated*

Sorry


Cheers,
Arch.

 

Hello Arch,

It's very strange, may be you get this confirmation: "The image archive file will be created on the same partition that you are going to backup! It's highly recommended that you copy this archive to another partition or removable media because you will not bo able to restore this image archive should the partition becomes corrupted. Are you sure you want to continue with this procedure? " Please choose "Yes" and start creation.

Thank you.
--
Irina Shirokova

 

I understand your frustration, archie, but there is nothing *I* can do about that. I am trying to narrow down where the problem is, and that requires your participation and for you to try & verify different issues. It is entirely up to you though, if you do not want to continue the search.

 

I am in the exact same boat here. I am using True Image 8.0 build 859. I created a backup image of my C: drive which is a RAID 0 (striped) array on two 120 GB hard drives. It is using a Via 8237 controller.

When I explore the image, I find that the files inside the image are corrupted. Unfortunately I've already deleted the two image files I created (one on an external HDD connected via Firewire, the other on my C: partition) but any file greater than, oh, about 1 KB was corrupt. I opened several JPG files and they wouldn't display correctly, and a text file was definitely corrupted after about the first KB.

My next test is to try making an image from the rescue CD.

Is there anything else I can do to try and troubleshoot this? I just bought True Image today hoping that it would be a reliable way to keep a backup of my system.

 

Ok, I'm using Acronis Server Enterprise edition 1143...

Used it extensively to "clone" HDD's while I was doing an upgrade for a client.

After the update to Windows 2003 SP1, I've installed server edition - here is my story...

1) Scheduled tasks wouldn't run. Had to solve this issue myself, found workaround by using a different administrator capable account to schedule tasks.

2) Found out it was nearly impossible to do rolling backups with the scheduler. After a lot of time & talk on the forum, wrote a script that handles the backup, thanks to a lot of users on wilders' input, I made it work. Ok great, another problem solved by the community.

3) Got scared by this thread and other threads like it. Downloaded the checksum utility.

Checked a file that was on the system disk from the first backup. I've made 7 incrementals since, the file never changed, it's from my "install" map:

Results:

Firefox Installer

Original 9375AD1CE846A219252416D5A3453D46
Clone incr 7 9E40497B2DB482E04BB1D4C7BBFD449B
Clone base 113D0766CCDDFD104657E355625A86AB

Excuse me? I've checked *all* these backups with verify, as I'm in testing. These files never changed between the base backup and the last incremental, yet they are *different*

So no file works. Can't open zip files, damaged .EXE's... only 12kb text files "seem" ok, until I open them. They end abruptly.

Well folks... that's it for me. I've been here on the forum quite a bit, tried to help out a few people...

Is the backup mounting broken, or is the backup no good? Franky, I don't give a d*mn anymore.

I'm going to apply to my local reseller, Portland, to give me a refund. I lost my confidence in this product, and will go back to what I know and trust, a well known competing product.

Everyone in here, have a nice life, I hope you check your backups regulary in a test environment, don't wait until a bad situation happens.

I'm glad I've seen "the light" (or rather the lack of it) in testing.

 

Yeah, something currently seems to be broken in TI. See also https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=84019 (I got no reply yet). Have you ever run chkdsk against a mounted NTFS image?

 

I tried, seems like the backup file is one big mess. Nothing is right, browsing directories is all I can do, opening something is telling me the file is corrupted.

 

Uh oh, Acronis, this was worrying me. So, I ran a quick test on build 859. Made an image and then tried to restore files from a mounted image. Just a quick test found that most jpg files are corrupted in the mounted image and when restored. I'm sure that other problems are lurking. This appears to be a mounting issue as a quick check of a full restore seems to be fine. I would have to advise users to use the current versions of True Image with extreme caution.

 

beenthereb4, confirmed. It seems to be a problem with the image mounter, after a real restore everythings shows up intact.

 

unbelievable.

Is there no quality check when releasing builds?

So this problem is confirmed in 859 and 1143....

Ace going Acronis!

 

Just to follow up from my previous post -- I used the restore CD to create the image on my external Firewire drive. I then verified the image and it didn't report any errors.

I then rebooted into windows, mounted the image, and started examining files, and find that only very small files are correct. Anything else is corrupted after the first few KB.

From other's replies it sounds like it's a problem with the code that handles mounting the image, not with the backup image itself, which makes me feel a little bit better.

I did try the trial version and did a full backup and restore on a different system and everything worked fine. The system booted up and ran just like normal, so I am confident that the image is correct (which matches other's reports here.) I even mounted an image and browsed the directory structure, but I didn't bother actually inspecting files in the mounted image (which I should have done. Oh well.)

 

I'm using ATI Enterprise 1143, and I just created images to test this possibility of file corruption.

I backed up my NTFS C: partition to a NAS box and mounted the image when done. The mounted drive checks fine with the Windows built-in 3-stage filesystem checker. I checked the MD5 of a few arbitrary large files... they were fine.

So no problem here, as far as I can tell. I'm running Windows 2000 pro.

 

Aha, that is strange.

I'm running 1143 but backup to an external USB drive. The images are fine when mounted from the former build.

I am running Win 2003 SP1, which has some of the changes XP SP2 has. Maybe the problem is in the latest windows service packs.

Can the people that reported corrupted 1143 check their OS and SP please?

 

Hello all,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Remote Server Backup Software.

The problem discussed here is known and reported to our Development Team. More information about it is in my answer at this thread.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman