Archives Corrupted

Hi,

I am running Windows 2000 SP4 with TI v10 Home

I am unable to reliably create disk images that pass the validation process.
ABout 1 in 10 tries produces a working image.

Any ideas?

Ian

 

Run Chkdsk on your hard drive. Where are you storing the images?

 

Yep, ChkDsk all drives no reported errors.
I have tried saving them to internal IDE, SATA and external USB.

Even though the archive verification reports them as corrupt I can still mount the image and access all the files. Should it allow me to do this if they are truly corrupt?

Ian

 

You're not the only one having trouble. When I try to create an archive 50% of the time I get told that it has failed to read some sector or other. I only get told that when I go to do a restore mind; at the time of making the archive I am left to believe that everything went smoothly. Do I believe I have bad sectors on my hard disk? Not that many, and, inany case, the firmware in modern drives is designed to automatically substitute good sectors for bad sectors when they occur.

 

I trust you ran chkdsk on all partitions with the /r switch so it does a surface scan.

Another possible cause is memory. Run Memtest+, available free from www.memtest.org. It only takes one bad bit to have a multi-gigabyte archive declared corrupt. For a thorough test let it run overnight. Memtest is good but it doesn't run in the same environment that a validate or restore runs in with an additional heavy disk and processor load; if you have multiple sticks of memory in your PC try them one at a time if possible.

Your PC should not be overclocked and the memory should be running with standard timing not aggessive timings.

It is a process of elimination and sometimes it is very hard to pin down if something is just a little marginal.

 

I bought TrueImage Home 9 just three weeks ago and upgraded to V10 only this week, but here's my experience so far: two of the two (100%) disk image files I created from within Windows 2000 Pro were labeled as "corrupt" when I tried to restore them, but two of the two (100%) disk images I created after booting from the Restore CD worked flawlessly. (One good and one bad image each with V9 and V10.)

Because I immediately test the image file by restoring to another drive and then try to boot from it, I did not enable image verification, so I don't know if it would have caught the corruption (if that's what it is).

Personally, I'm fine with using TI from the bootable CD only, so this is not a big deal, but it may shed some light on the problems described in this thread.

 

Yes I ran chkdsk with the "find and fix everyting" option

I have not run a memory test yet so will do this next.
The PC is not overclocked or tweaked in any way.
P4 3Ghz, 2GB Dual Channel RAM

I will also try running a backup and verification from the boot CD.

It is like all intermitent problems you are always left wondering if it has realy worked. Even if the verification says it's OK I still have my doughts. It makes me shudder as I only found out about this problem when I replaced my system hard disk for a larger one and discovered most of my images were bad.
Thank god I never had to call on my backups of over 10,000 photographs that live on a seperate disk!

I had not been doing verifications because of the time invovled, slap wrists! ;-)

Ian

 

OK here is the latest.

I tried creating some backups via the boot CD yesterday and although the backups completed OK, when verified they would be reported as corrupt archives.

I next ran memtest86+ overnight and to my surprise I logged 25 errors when running the random number generated tests (test number 7).

The address ranges were all different but the error bit was the same. I did some googling and found reports that matched my symptons where by most apps ran OK but anything that realy pushed the RAM accuracy failed. I suspect that my RAM is just a little out of spec.

I run good quality RAM complete with heatsinks and so felt comfortable increasing the RAM voltage by 0.1v.

Now everything runs OK, all archive verifications report OK, even the archives that had previously reported as corrupt are now checking out as good.

To say I am relieved is an understatement.

I have ordered some replacement RAM just in case my uping the voltage casues any longterm problems but from what I have read and from previous experience it should be OK.

Hope this helps others experiencing similar problems.

CHECK THAT RAM!

Ian

 

Glad you found the problem. Your experience of logging errors during the random test mirrors mine when dealing with failures that might be described as marginal. They don't seem to show up with the fixed patterns like "walking ones" etc.

I am have an older AMD machine set with slightly more aggessive timings. I increased the voltage by 0.1V on its memory years ago and it has been just fine but you never know if the RAM is actually failing.