Drive C: trashed. Acronis TI 9.0 not recognizing TIB files

A non-technical friend used Acronis True Image 9.0 under winXP to back up drive C: onto a secure zone partition on drive D:. He did create the Acronis emergency boot CD.

Drive C: failed some time later. It contained irreplaceable and very valuable business files. He can't afford to loose this information.

He installed a new Drive C: and tried to restore the Acronis backup using the emergency CD. The Acronis restore could not find a secure zone on drive D:.

After several days on the phone with Acronis tech support and not getting anywhere he brought the machine to me to see if I could help.

We made an image copy of his entire drive D: so we have a copy to play with. Drive D: has two partitions on it. An NTFS partition of 11 gigs, and an "unknown" extended partition of about 100 gigs. The extended partition uses partition id 'bc'. The Acronis restore could indeed not see that partition.

Using Knoppix, I could mount that partition as a vfat partition and see a bunch of TIB files in it.

I changed the acronis partition id to 'c' (Fat32) and suddenly the Acronis restore software could see the partition and the TIB files in it.

Where we are stuck is now the Acronis software is saying that the TIB files are not Acronis True Image files. I've tried verify archive to no avail. Same error.

QUESTIONS:

1. what is the correct partition ID for the acronis secure zone partition?

2. What does True Image use to determine whether or not a file is a valid archive? A leading byte pattern? File attributes?

3. Does True Image use some kind of separate index file to determine the validity of an archive?

4. Are there any tools available akin to a file system editor that would allow you to look into the structure of these files?

5. Any other suggestions?

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

 

Can you copy the .tib files out of the SZ and on to the standard partition on D and try the restore from there?
You might also try to "mount" the .tib files and see if you can restore just the needed data files instead of doing a complete disk restore.
You can also download the trial version of the latest (version 10) and see if that will restore the .tib files, and if not, again see if ver. 10 will let you mount the files to get at the data.

When you get your friend out of this, advise him not to use the SZ - that was useful in the days when to have a second hard drive was a rare thing. Also to keep a seperate backup of his data by simply using Windows Explorer to copy them.

 

What is the build number of the TI 9? Certainly the first couple of builds gave no end of grief. Log on and download build 3677 if this not the version installed. The best procedure would be to do a temp install on your computer to burn a fresh rescue CD. Make sure that any other version you have on your machine is uninstalled first. Now try this new CD on the friend's computer the D drive containing the SZ should be found and the restore to the new C drive should complete.

An aside to DwnNdrty,
Why do you knock down the use of a secure zone at every opportunity? Used sensibly on a second hard drive as the OP has done is one of the best possible backup methods. Anyway advising him to change horses in mid- stream does not really help his present dificulties.
Rant over

Xpilot

 

There are too many users who get themselves into trouble using it. And nowadays it is an unnecessary feature. There are alternatives that are far less troublesome. I know you use it to great advantage - more power to you. But for the rest of us "ordinary Joes" ... why tempt fate!

 

According to Disk Directory the ID is '0bch' for the SZ and '00ch' for standard FAT32 LBA. I assume the 'h' is just to denote hexidecimal format.

There are several ways TI will tell immediately that the file is a valid TIB. One for for the filename to be wrong. Another is if the number is incorrect at the end of a multi-part backup or part is missing.

Not as far as I know.

You could use a file editor (hexidicmal editor, for example) to see the files, but if they are corrupted there's not much you can do about it.

Now that you have the partition accesible as a standard FAT32 partition did you copy (as DwnNdrty suggested) all the .TIBs from the SZ partition to another partition (say on another hard drive) and then check if it can be mounted, verified or explored?

Can you post a list of the files contained in the partition? It might help to see them.

 

Now version 10.0, build 4,871 is also reporting corrupted archives when attempting to restored archives created with v 9.0.

V 9.0 used to work and had successfully restored my drive many times in the past. Now it fails with error e00070020 when validated or restoring via either the program or the rescue disk.

After initially experiencing this problem with v 9.0 archives, I downloaded v 10.0 as a last hope. The archive verifies properly with v 10.0, but then reports error e00070020 when attempting to restore either through the program itself or the rescue disk.

The archives, and I have three of them of different dates, were created with version 9.0, but neither v 9.0 nor v10.0 resue disks willl complete the restore due to the error message.

I am using an external drive, usb connected. My computer has eight partitions on a single 160 GB drive. The archive is about 14 GB in size. I'm running Windows XP Pro, fully updated.

Although I can mount the archive and retrieve the data, it would be a painstaking process to manually recreate my partitions and reinstall all my software and tweak their settings.

I just want this archive to restore! As it now stands, the attempted restore trashed my drive by deleting all existing partitions and data and then failed to proceed due to error e00070020.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Talking to tech support, I copied the files to an NTFS partition but True Image was still unable to recognize the files as a "valid true image" archive.

How do you do such a "mount"?

 

I have build 2323.

Ok. I will give that a try. I have my friends machine and all his boxed software here, including True Image, where do I go to get a login id so I can download the update?

That makes sense to me. Thanks for the suggestions!

 

What's the internal format of the TIB files?

Yes. Pointing TI at the copied fields yields the same results. "The file is not a True Image Archive".

AAC1.TIB size 4,194,304KB
AAC2.TIB "
AAC3.TIB "
AAC4.TIB "
AAC5.TIB "
AAC6.TIB "
AAC7.TIB size 1,914,112KB
AAC8.TIB size 4.194,304KB
AAC9.TIB "
AAC10.TIB "
AAC11.TIB size 1,875,224KB

I asked the customer support rep about the size of AAC7.TIB and he seemed to think that was indicative of an incremental backup.

There is another archive ranging from AAD1.TIB through AAD11.TIB. It is also unrecognized as a TIB archive.

 

https://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/my/updates/

If already registered sign in on the right hand side of the page and then pickup the product update history at the foot of the next page to select 3677.

If not registered this will have to be done first. You will need the Ti serial number which can be a variety of places depending on how the product was purchased.

Xpilot

 

yml,

Hopefully, updating to build 3,677 will solve your problem.

The internal format of a TIB file is probably only known by Acronis. I don't think they have ever released it.

The files AAC7.TIB and AAC11.TIB in the list you provided are just the last files in their image groups. FAT32 has a 4GB limit so the last file in the backup is normally smaller.

 

Since it's normally not possible to copy files out of a SecureZone, I'd wonder about the validity of these files. Wouldn't you?

When trying the restore with the newer version of TI 9, shouldn't he try to restore from the SecureZone directly?

 

If TI will recognize the SZ correctly, then I would agree that an attempt should be made to restore directly. However, according to yml, he hasn't been able to get TI to detect the SZ.

There have been previous posts on changing the partition type to standard FAT32 and getting TIB files copied out. This is a last resort situation and has been successful in some cases.

Can I copy the secure zone image as a .tib file?

 

With some help from customer support, I got ahold of the latest build of TI 9.0 and it looks like it's working like a champ. It recognizes the archives and I am able to mount them and take a look around. I am now trying a restore and it looks like it's working.

THANK YOU ALL FOR THE POINTER TO THE NEW VERSION!

 

Just curious if the new build recognized the TIBs in the Secure Zone or are you using the TIBs you copied out?