Backups Corrupted

Hi,

I have just installed Acronis 8 on my WXP Pro machine I have two HD's one for backup.

Three times I have tried to backup my C drive (30 gigs used of 120 gigs)
each time the check shows up as corrupt.

Its a fresh install of XP, I have tried shutting down AVGm and all running programmes all no good any advice please.

 

What is your motherboard, and what kind of drives are you using?

Grant

 

Two Maxtor Sata drives not set up as rain Asus A7A Delux MB

 

Sorry Rain = Raid

 

Sorry my MB is an Asus A7NX Deluxe the archive mounts OK and there are no error messages shown in the log.

I'm dissapointed that this is not as simple as I was led to believe Norton Ghost let me down and I can't be bothered to spend much time on this.

Having just bought this via download can I get a refund if not I guess I can talk with my credit card company.

 

Hi Steve135,
Have a look at comment by Hoopster at https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=71770
Could a faulty disk enclosure be your problem?

 

RAM corruption is very likely.

Test your RAM using a MEMTEST86+ bootable CD.

http://www.memtest.org

 

Defitely run Memtest as suggested. Run it for a minimum of 12 hours!

Since you are using two internal hard drives, there shouldn't be any problem unless there is a hardware problem. Have you tweaked the system in any way to increase performance? Overclocking, or faster memory settings can introduce errors that only show up with large files such as those created for backup images.

If you didn't specify a size to split your backup at, you might try it again with splitting set to 1GB (1024MB). If you are having a large file size issue, this may be a work around until you find the source of the problem.

 

Steve135

I asked about your drives and motherboard, as I have the same problem. I have an Asus A7N8X rev. 1.04 board,with two Seagate SATA drives. I cannot get a good image if I go from one drive to the other. The image is created fine, but it is always corrupt. I have no problem imaging one partition to another partition on the same drive.

You can test your memory,as the others have said, but I did that, and found no problems. My drives are fine, the cables are fine, and I can duplicate the problem on two other machines that I have with the same setup.

I'm dealing with Asus and trying to deal with Silicone Image, who makes the SATA controller. In the meantime, I can image to a PATA drive on my home network. Also, I just installed a small PATA drive in my machine and I can image from either SATA drive to it perfectly.

I also did a MD5 checksum test, copying large files from one SATA drive to the other, and the checksums never matched. If I copied from one partition to another on the same drive, or to the PATA drive, the checksums matched.

So, it would appear that this is not an Acronis problem

There are guys on this list with Abit boards, who had the same problem, and they fixed it by increasing the P2P discard time in their bios's. Unfortunately, Asus does not include that setting in its bios for the A7N8X.

Grant

 

Grant thanks for your message its a comfort to know that this is a general problem I don't have any other alernative backup media so this programme is essentially useless to me.

 

This is a nice piece of work that clearly demonstrates that the problem is between two SATA drives with this SATA implementation.

Since an internal PATA drive and a networked drive provide good images, I'd expect an external USB 2.0 or Firewire drive should work equally well and might be a more general solution than the internal PATA drive. Have you tried this?

 

I don't have an Asus MB but I do have two SATA drives connected as non-RAID to a Sil 3112A controller (using latest Microsoft HQL signed SataLink driver). No problem imaging and restoring between the two drives.

Might be worth checking the motherboard BIOS version and flashing an update if necessary. Also worth installing the latest Sil SataLink drivers (if operating in non-RAID mode).

Regards

 

Hi Menorcaman

I have the latest BIOS from Asus, and I was even sent a beta one from Asus. It didn't help.

I also have the latest drivers and utilities from Silicon Image - no luck.

I know that 2 SATA drives will work on some motherboards using the 3112A controller, but the A7N8X is not one of them.

Grant

 

Hi Grant,

Most strange. One thing for sure, I can't fault you for trying!!

Just a thought but are you using the SataLink or SataRaid drivers? They will both work in non-RAID mode. In the early days the SataRaid drivers had a slight speed advantage and was the preferred route. However, nowadays I find there is no difference and would recommend the use of SataLink for non-RAID configurations.

Regards

 

Since you've done all you can to make this work, I wonder what would happen if you installed a new SATA drive controller PCI card, perhaps one from Promise Technologies and connected the drives to it instead of the motherboard. The Promise SATA150 TX2Plus is about $50. Promise also makes RAID SATA controllers, but this one allows two SATA drives in a non-RAID arrangement.

Menorcaman, what do you think of this idea on systems that seem to have trouble with file corruption on SATA drives?

 

@gwilki - did you try to determine *when* the copy starts to fail? Try something like this:

Code:

copy X:\SomeSmalFile.txt X:\TestFile1.txt
:Loop

dir X:\TestFile1.txt
copy X:\TestFile1.txt Y:\TestFile1.txt
copy X:\TestFile1.txt+X:\SomeSmalFile.txt X:\TestFile2.txt
del X:\TestFile1.txt
ren X:\TestFile2.txt TestFile1.txt

goto :Loop

 

Hi John and Grant,

I still can't help feeling that this is a BIOS and/or SATA driver problem. Going down the route you suggest John would bypass one or both of these so it could well prove successful.

However, I've just Googled for 3 hours (I've gone cross eyed!!) for "Asus A7N8X" + "file corruption" and on the final page of the results found a thread containing the exact same problem. Grant, I recommend you read this thread titled <File corruption if copied to a different physical drive> before trying anything drastic. If that doesn't provide the answer then the only other thing I can suggest is have a look at the power rating of your PSU, particularly the 12vdc supply. Depending on how many devices you've got hanging off the 12v connectors, two HDs reading and writing at the same time might just be pushing the PSU over the edge.

Regards to you both
Tom

 

Hi Tom and John

Tom, it's funny because I found that same thread on PC banter last night. I tried to find the zip file the guy speaks about, but searches on Asus for it fail to return anything.

I did find a satalink driver on SiliconImage, and replaced the Asus sataraid driver with it. I couldn't even get Windows to start. I was able to "use last known good configuration" and it was reverted to the Asus sataraid driver. According to that other thread, Asus has combined the satalink and sataraid drivers, and somehow modified the controller. That may be correct since the satalink drivers will not work on my board. I also found on the Asus site a throw away line in one of their documents that says that the Si3112a controller that they are using does not support SATA drives in a non-raid configuration. I've asked Asus about that and not received a reply.

I believe my power supply is ok. I'm running a 450, and it really doesn't breathe hard with what I am doing. Nothing is overclocked and I can duplicate this problem on another machine that I have access to with the same configuration.

It seems to be a problem with the speed at which the drives talk to each other. The Abit board allows the user to slow things down somewhat, and that solves the problem. The Asus board does not.

All this to say, that we cannot blame the problem on Acronis, in my humble opinion. I would like to, since they seem to be the types who would exert some effort to fix it. But, this is a corruption problem of any large file being moved from one drive to the other.

Grant

 

Hi Grant,

For what it's worth, on my GA-7N400 Pro 2 I can load the SataRAID driver, reset the BIOS to RAID (without setting up a RAID array) and Windows boots just fine. However, if I then revert to the SataLink driver and set the BIOS accordingly, Windows refuses to boot and I'm forced to restore from my image file.

Notwithstanding the above, it appears that Asus disabled the Sil 3112A SataLink capability on the A7N8X motherboard. Probably because early versions of the SataLink drivers resulted in p..s poor data transfer rates, although this is definitely no longer the case. As for your PSU, 450 Watts should be more than enough, particulary if the 12V rail pushes out more than 18 Watts.

As you say, this is not a True Image problem and I guess you will now be pursuing this particular demon via one of the many hardware forums. Good luck and we hope to see youl posting back with a success story.

Regards
Tom