Macrium Failing Backup but paragon completes fine....!

I've been using Paragon Hard disk manager for a few years now ( 11 now ), and only ever use the winpe recovery disk to backup my partition.

Anyway, I reeeally have been waiting for incremental backups, but it seem PHDM will never do it, so after reading so much good about macrium here, I decided to buy it, since it has new winpe and can do incremental backups.


I made the M5 ( macrium v5) winpe disk, and ready to image windows partition.

But no matter what, it aborts halfway through and gives error code 1117, i/o device error.

Also, while its backing up to a separate partition on the same drive ( Samsung f3 ), it makes a real chugging noise.
I tried to backup to mapped network drive ( gbit lan ), and it still stops halfway through, although it is slightly faster overall time and the HDD doesn't make much noise at all! for example it had total time around 10 mins, whereas when backing to samsung partition, time remaining is around 20 mins, and does not evenly reduce.


I unchecked verify file system, even so, I manually checked it before backing up and there is no errors. I also unzipped all folders of drivers for my hardware and let M5 scan them when the recovery usb first loads up, and it does whatever it needs to install them.
I tried imaging about 3-4 times, they all aborted. With or without loading drivers into winpe.


The reason it is sooo frustrating, is that, I then booted up the PHDM recovery and basically loaded no drivers, and imaged the same partition.
It created the image in about 3-5 min, no problems, HDD sounded normal. I verified the image, and it said its ok.....

so what's going on here?

Right now, I've wasted about 3-4 hrs on something that was supposed to take 30mins! It really feels like I just paid money to trouble myself.

my board is asus z68vpro gen3, and samsung f3 is plugged into the intel sata2 3g port, no other HDD/cdrw plugged in.

Thanks.

 

Macrium always gave me problems from not detecting my drives properly to not reading my external hard drive so I was unable to restore etc.

I am now using Paragon Compact Edition, thanks to giveawayoftheday and it works great

 

The error you mentioned happens when there is a problem with your hard drive. Check windows event logs for detail. You can usually solve this by running check disk on the suspected partition/hard drive with both options enabled in chkdsk.

 

I already did chkdsk from within windows, but only ticked the first box ( not the repair sector box ) and it turned up fine.

So, could it be that the HDD has bad sectors?

I will scan later fully, but lets assume for a second the HDD turn out to have bad sectors. Does this mean that Macrium is much better at detecting a failing drive than Paragon??
Like I said, Paragon HDM basically imaged it in 3-5mins, with the control archive integrity option enabled ( I think that's what its called ). Also I verified the image manually afterwards, and it was fine.
Is paragon giving false sense of security?


Lastly, if the HDD has bad sectors, does this carry on in the Image, like if I restore it to another HDD, will anything bad happen to it?


thanks.

 

Yes, the error you are getting is because of the fact that you probably have bad sectors on your hard drive. Chkdsk with both options enabled will correct this.

Control archive integrity in Paragon does not check the disk for errors. That option is only to ensure that the resultant backup archive created is problem free and has no problems in restore. The option to check the disk is called file system integrity check and by default it is usually set to run only once. So, if your hard drive developed bad sectors after the check was run then paragon will not be able to know that the disk has bad sectors.

Macrium on the other hand has the file system check enabled by default and runs it before each backup, unless you disable it. So, that is why you are getting the error from Macrium and not Paragon.

I would recommend you disable disk checking from within the backup program as it consumes needless time and run chkdsk manually on your drive twice a month.

And your final question, yes if the hard disk has bad sectors it will carry on in the image and when you restore the image that particular sector will still be bad. Imaging utilities usually just backup whatever they see, whether it is good data or garbage data.

 

As I understand it, a "bad" sector is not a sector that contains "garbage", but one that can´t be read from or written to. So, if a disk contains bad sectors, the creation of an image should fail with any program.

 

Sometimes a sector can be read properly but can not be written to. So, one will not encounter any problems in the image creation process. Image restore will likely fail.

But you maybe right too, as I have never encountered a bad sector on my hard drives, so I do not have any practical experience dealing with them.

However, the problem and error encounter by @iHZ is simply a bad sector problem and can be easily corrected using chkdsk.

 

Ok, But if the disk has bad sectors, shouldn't paragon encounter an error like macrium does, when it cant read or write from that bad sector?

File system check? Isn't that just checking the file system, which is different form checking for bad sectors?

When macrium does this File system check just before imaging process, anyway it is very fast. It says under the progress bar "checking file system", this completes fast and no problems.
It's only after progressing to the next stage of imaging, that it encounters the error, half way through the backup process.

or are you saying that macrium continually checks for file system errors and bad sectors while it is actually imaging, all the way through to the completion, and paragon does not?

chkdsk for bad sectors, or for file system errors? I think the two are confusing me at this stage, as I didn't know paragon or macrium actually check for disk errors during the backup process, but only the files system integrity. I always thought doing a proper disk check for disk errors and not file system errors, always needed to be done manually and separately...

Still not understanding how macrium can encounter a bad sector and obliviously abort because it cannot read/write from it, yet paragon can completely disregard it, and verify that it's ok?


SO, if I restore the paragon image to another drive, and then image that with macrium, and it completes without error, what exactly does all that mean?

 

Yes, I think is different. "Repairing" a bad sector means to me to "disable" a sector that cant´be read or written to, and, if possible, writing the information to another sector. The disabled sector won´t be accessed again.

I also think that this process is also executed automatically by the disk firmware. Because of this, in the SMART parameters there is a field called "Reallocated sector count" which keeps a count of how many times this has happened. When a threshold is reached, an alarm is set, in practice indicating that is necessary to change the disk.

The only imaging program that I have used that permits managing bad sectors is O&O DiskImage. From the O&O DI manual:

"If an error occurs, you can specify... whether the read process should be aborted or continued. If continued, the bad sector will be saved in the image as an unused sector. The remaining data that is still readable will then be available in the image."

Obviously, this option should´t be used when creating images of the system partition.

 

It should but as I pointed out earlier you need to enable that option in Paragon as it is only enabled to run once, at the time of the first backup creation and then it will not run. If you enable it, Paragon should also abort.

I was trying to avoid a comparison between macrium and Paragon because that is a discussion that has no resolution. I have used both Paragon and macrium extensively but I have never used their built in disk checking. I just run chkdsk on my disk once a month and I have never encountered any bad sectors or such. I would recommend you do the same. I have yet to encounter a disk check utility that provides any better functionality than chkdsk.

The error code you provided is a known error and you can go through these posts to see if it applies to you.

Chkdsk with both options (file system and bad sector) enabled. I have personally never run either macrium or paragon's built-in disk check utility and I believe they both actually just call on chkdsk anyway. You can read their respective manuals to see what they do during a disk check.

Enable the file system check in Paragon to run every time and see if paragon also aborts.

Also as I mentioned earlier when the error occurs with macrium, there will be a log file generated in windows even manager. It will tell you in detail what actually has happened. It maybe some other problem or some conflict that is causing this error.

That means you are over analyzing the situation

 

Yes, this is also how I understand it, if an imaging app encounters a bad sector, it will get stuck and eventually abort.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean to be honest. I never backup in windows, like I said, I only use the recovery disk.

Neither Macrium or paragon check for bad sectors before creating an image, and neither of them ignore bad sectors in the process of backing up.

They do both check the file system, but like I said, file system integrity checking in both macrium and paragon and windows passes without error.

Yes, I will do a full disk check as I suspect there might be bad sectors.

But like I said, neither program does a full system check for bad sectors automatically, and both by default will abort on bad sectors or show in log.

One can only scan the disk fully for bad sectors manually. In paragon I think it is called surface scan, I don't even think macrium has an equivalent scan in winpe other than maybe manually running a full chkdsk.

File system check, yes maybe it can run every time, but it passes that manually anyway.

I dont think there's an option to run a full surface scan for bad sectors before every backup. That would take a while I think.


I'm pretty sure every backup software by default should encounter an error and abort if it comes across bad sectors during the backup process.

I only use winpe disk, also there is no errors in the log file, only the error that is displayed onscreen when it aborts.

Also macrium mention this error is for bad sectors:

Backup aborted! Unable to read from disk - Error Code 23 - Data error (cyclic redundancy check)

But it would be nice to know if paragon is skipping data in bad sectors and completing the backup, without reporting any errors about encountering bad sectors and continuing anyway. I wouldn't have much faith in the images if this was the case. But I doubt any backup program would do this !


Which means
HDD has bad sectors, and paragon is untrustworthy.
HDD has no bad sectors and macrium doesn't like the hardware.
or HDD has bad sectors, but not on the windows partition, paragon is fine, macrium has a problem.

 

I guess to summarize, I do not know why macrium is failing and paragon has no problem with the same drive. It might be that since paragon is a full hard disk manager and it also loads its partitioning algorithms when you initiate a drive backup from within it, it might have a built-in workaround if it encounters such problem in a hard drive. Macrium on the other hand is just an imaging utility so when it encounters a similar problem it aborts.

As far as reliability is concerned, provided you hard drive is okay and has no bad sectors on it, then both marcium and paragon are extremely reliable. Just make sure you run chkdsk with both bad sectors and file system options enabled on your hard drive at least once a month and you will be good.

 

All I know, is paragon imaged in 5 minutes and restored in 5 mins on a different HDD. I manually did a file system check with both macrium, paragon, and chkdsk and all turned out fine.

I still have to do a full scan for bad sectors on the original HDD, later though.


I also did a backup with macrium pe on the new hdd ( after restoring the paragon imaged ) and it completed, after more failed attempts.

This time not from any I/O error, but not enough space on destination folder!

Why? because macrium is including both the pagefile and hiberfil files......
I had to manually delete them to do successfully complete a backup.

Even if I connect the HDD as slave drive, macrium under windows, still backs up the partition with pagefile/hiberfil..

This is not good first impressions for this software. If only paragon had incremental backup feature, I would have been finished a few days ago!