A lesson for computer novices thinking of buying and a request for help

I'm not sure you are right here. Surely Acronis should restore Windows XP to the raid drives as long as you have the disks set to the original raid in the bios. Unless perhaps Acronis will not work with the particular raid you have and Acronis would need to fix this. Acronis has been around long enough to work with raid drives unless you have some new type of raid that it does not yet accomodate.

 

Yes, this should be pursued with Acronis regarding the RAID. I'm not sure what getting the drivers on floppies will accomplish in the standalone Linux CD environment.

BartPE may be a more viable solution.

 

Butting in here, I have just a few comments.

We are talking about restoring precious personal files, so the most important thing here is to find the most reliable way to do it.

Doing as jmk suggests sounds like a very reliable method to me. With 2 partitions, and a working Windows install on partition #1, you are almost gauranteed to be able to copy the backup images of the external drive onto partition #2.

At that point, you can disconnect the external drive which is a sure way to keep your backup intact!

All further work will be done on a copy of the backup, and you can safely repeat the recovery procedure over and over again, untill you get it to work reliably.

And as has already been pointed out, removing the external drive, USB chipsets, USB drivers, etc, etc, and instead working with S/P-ATA drives is (unfortunately) more reliable than anything else.

 

My experience with external USB (or Firewire) drives also indicates they are not entirely reliable. In an effort to improve on the situation, I bought an Adaptec external USB2 enclosure which I assumed was about as good as possible (it wasn't particularly cheap anyway). This however has not proved to be true: it needs a fan pointed at it if I use it for more than about 30 minutes at a time with a 400GB Seagate drive in it.

I now backup to an internal hard drive which is there soley for that purpose, then archive the backups in turn to three external USB drives. This way I'm pretty darned sure the original backup is good, and the most recent backup is always on hand if I screw up a file.

I'd therefore re-iterate that getting the backup drive out of the external enclosure and into the PC is a good idea, even if you don't leave it there afterwards. If nothing else, it will make restore attmpts much faster.

On a related topic, it would really be helpful if the True Image verification was more reliable and gave more indication of what's wrong. Maybe even the option to carry on during restore if an error occurs. This is sure as heck one of the most persistent problems people (not me yet though) seem to run into with True Image.

 

This sounds good but remember that the original Windows installation was on a single 400GB drive made up of two 200GB drives in a raid configuration. If the total size of the Windows installation the image was made of was greater than 200GB then you could only restore the image to the two drives as a single raid drive as one of the drives would not be big enough to fit it on. Fozzy indicated that the image was 170GB and this is compressed so the image when restored may not fit onto one 200GB drive and Fozzy would be forced to have the drives in a raid setup and he has already indicated Acronis does not appear to work with the drives in a raid setup. Jmk's idea is good it may not be feasible in practise.

 

A happy ending to the story.

Ok, so last night I managed to reinstall windows. I did have the sata drivers on the Windows rescue disk. What I had been doing wrong apparently was first not to remove the RAID 0 before trying to reinstall xp.

I then reinstalled Acronis and was able to mount the external drive (wouldnt let me do this from the boot disk) From this I have been able to copy across the key files which all appear to be intact.

Took me 6 hours and I no longer have RAID but what a relief. Moreover the wife has now allowed me to come out from the kennel - her ebay pictures are saved.

Thanks for everyones help and comments. All much appreciated.

 

We do this on every single PC sold by my company; 1st partition has Windows and is usually around 20GB, the 2nd partition has My Documents on it; a new folder is named My Documents and the original is moved from within the Windows partition to this folder. We place a second folder on the 2nd partition called Acronis Images and this is where all images are stored; 1st image is with Windows fully up to date, 2nd Image is with all known programs that work together - MS Office, Nod32 Firefox etc, this is the final image before it leaves the store.

We recommend that the client has a second hard drive for My Documents and Acronis Images to be backed up to, this is usually done through Karen’s Replicator.

If the client can afford it or is a business we recommend having third hard drive, a USB Hard drive where again My Documents and Acronis Images are backed up to.

This system is extremely simple and easy to maintain, it works very well.

Cheers

 

I meant that it may not be feasible in Fozzy's particular case rather than generally because the image of Fozzy's Windows installation is quite likely too big to restore to one drive. Fozzy's two internal drives are 200GB each and in raid would be a single 400GB drive that Windows etc was installed on. Restoring a Windows installation that was on a 400GB raid drive to a 200GB non raid drive may not be possible because the image very likely requires more space than a single drive can provide. In Fozzy's case the image of his installation was 170GB and might just fit onto one of the 200GB drives depending on how compressed it was and how big it becomes when uncompressed. If it doesn't fit then Jmk's suggestion is a good idea in theory but not feasible in practise which is the point I was making.

 

Hello Fozzy,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are very sorry for the delay with the response.

It looks like the image archive stored on your external USB hard drive is not actually corrupted. The problem is most likely caused either by your particular external hard drive not being properly supported in Acronis Rescue Environment, i.e. when using Bootable Rescue CD or by this particular hard drive\USB port being faulty on read operations.

Whatever the actual reason is, first of all, please make sure that you use the latest build (3567) of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home which is available at: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/updates/

You can find the full version name and build number by going to Help -> About... menu in the main program window.

To get access to updates you should create an account at:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/my/
then log in and use your serial number to register your software.

Please uninstall any previously installed build by following Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Acronis True Image, prior to installing build 3567.

Note that you should create new Bootable Rescue CD after installing the update.

After you install the update please create new image archive saving it on your external USB hard drive and then verify this image by means of the embedded Validate Backup Archive tool both when the latest build (3567) of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home is running from under Windows and when your computer is booted from Bootable Rescue CD created with the latest build (3567) of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home. If the image archive verifies successfully in both cases then the restore should be possible.

If at least once this image archive is being verified as corrupted then please inform us about the results of the following tests:

- Try using another USB port;

- Try unplugging all unneeded USB devices;

- Perform a memory test using the memtest86+ utility and inform us about the result;

- Try moving\copying large files, e.g. disk\partition images themselves, between the hard drives (especially to\from your external USB hard drive) and comparing their checksums calculated using eXpress CheckSum Calculator before and after the files were moved\copied;

- Create new image archive saving it to the internal hard drive and verify it by means of the embedded Validate Backup Archive tool both when the latest build (3567) of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home is running from under Windows and when your computer is booted from Bootable Rescue CD created using the latest build (3567) of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Raid 0 is much over-rated. It often turns out to be not much, if at all, faster than a single drive but much more likely to become corrupted.

The other feature of creating a large drive, the sum of two drives, isn't really needed today in most cases since 500MB drives are now available.

Raid1, mirroring, is useful. What you lose in speed is made up for by full real time backup if you value your data.

I'm glad that you are out of the dog house.

 

I'm late to the game but you could recover that data with forencis software - you can find most everything. Even after a drive has been wiped a good software recovery tool can find it. Look around the usual sources for files named

minipe
forencis toolkit (access data FTK)
Recover my files (so-so but easy)
Cia unerase (in minipe)
EnCase (steep learning curve)
Maybe for the next crash.

I have 3 USB drives (2 Seagate and 1 Western Digital) and they are all unreliable. I never trust Windows utilities. For every Windows utility or shell there are 5 shareware/freeware versions 10 times better. MS designed them to make just functional enough to Windows work, they really believed profit companies would come and make better versions of things like windows explorer or fax and picture viewer (which they did but no one uses)