Primary.arx and frozen.arx corrupted

Hello,

Those two snapshots are saved on my second data harddrive. Yesterday I had this message:"F is not accessible, the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

I run a complete ckddsk /f /r F: and Widows did repair at least three error in those two snapshots.

My question is, how those snapshots got corrupted in the first place as I haven't use them for the last week or so?

Second question, can I still trust those snapshots now or should I format my second harddrive and start fresh?

Thanks for your help.

 

Thanks Peter, I will delete all my archives and rebuild them, I think it's safer.

 

In the past, I also had a few corrupted archives.
I could see this on the main screen of FDISR, because the camera-icon had a RED cross or something.
I simply did a copy/update from snapshot to archive and that fixed the problem.
At least FDISR warns you, otherwise you wouldn't even know that an archive is corrupted.

 

I'm still puzzled to how a archive can get corrupted even if I did not use it for at least one month.

But I agree with you, at least FD ISR warn me.

 

Believe me, I wished, I knew the real cause of this. I'm very touchy when it comes to recovery softwares, they are supposed to save my computer, not me.

Because of this, I moved my archives temporarily to my second harddisk, which is my data partition [D:], because a possible reason could be that my external harddisk is responsible for this.
If I still get corrupted archives, I know at least that my external harddisk is innocent and that FDISR itself might be responsible for this.
Of course this will take some time, before it happens again.

 

Have not installed anything new in the last month. The only thing I did last week was to defrag my F DATA Drive with PerfectDisk 8.0.I only defrag my Data drive once every six month approx.

Could this be the problem?

 

My second suspicion is that my image backup software causes this, when it is writing its image to my external harddisk, where my archives are also stored and that this image-writing damages one of my archives, it was always one archive, not two. Of course there is no proof of this, I'm just guessing.

Nevertheless let us keep an eye on these archives and try to find the cause.

 

Yeah, could be Erik. Anyway it just tells me again that you can never be 100% sure even with your recovery Software.That's why I also have Acronis True Image.

 

I fully agree with this, I'm using now ShadowProtect, but ATI did a very good job during one year without any failure.
All softwares have their bugs and new releases have only lesser bugs.

It's also the mixture of softwares that creates malfunctions, I consider this even as normal. I would be an idiot if I would believe that all these softwares, written by different people, would work together without any failure at all.
Programmers are just people like you and me and they do make mistakes in coding applications.

 

Very true. Probably in the top 3 reasons software misbehaves.

My .arx SS gets updated weekly. Last week it malfunctioned. The .arx SS size was 16GB, not the usual 8GB and FD-ISR balked and would not run. After deleting the SS and a new copy / update Primary to Archive all was well.

It just goes to show ya. If it can happen, it will.

...screamer

 

I too experienced a very unusual occurance that i've yet to conclude what exactly corrupted.

I set another drive as MASTER with FD-ISR snaps & archives (separate partition/same drive) drive as SLAVE for a week or so. During this time i installed some security programs for testing. While a security program was building a database (it said), suddenly i begin to hear severe thrashing on the slave drive in which no windows were open or programs running; or so i thought.
While this thrashing was in progress i stopped the security program and the noise/activity immediately ceased. That gave me cause for concern because i keep BOTH snapshots AND archives to this particular drive.
Out of curiosity i rearranged the jumpers and booted up the drive that suffered the harsh activity and sure enough, got a Windows Error message and the GUI couldn't load. Checked other snapshots and they too were affected but at least a couple of them DID bootup normally. I carried out updating from archives but FD-ISR reported errors. Oh! oh.

I finally come to the conclusion that while building that database, the program i was testing either thru bad code or something else also JUMPED into this drive and proceeded to carry out some not so favorable actions to my snapshots. There was no way in settings to set just one system drive/partition, so in my estimate by default it scans ALL drives whether you want it to or not.

I tried to let CHKDSK run thru the main system partition but aborted at 25% when i noticed a ton of corrective measures being done. I've lost archives before running CHKDSK in the partition where they are stored and don't have a clue just why, it just happened, so that was a real concern since what happens if i can't boot ANY snapshots at all i thought. At least as-is i could access 2 of the 9 and proceed w/ some recovery thru the FD-ISR Manager plus alternative storaged archives, and review error logs which were showing FindFileFirst errors with this drive.

After fully REMOVING some snapshots and restructuring them anew with Copy/Update from archives, as well as simply copy/updating with those archives on the affected drive that weren't corrupted, i been able to piece back most of the snapshots as before. Great Program this FD-ISR

I hesitate ATM mentioning the security program i suspect as the culprit in this mess untill i can retry this scenario again with the same setup, because you want to be 100% certain it was THAT program and not some other unrelated issue.

At any rate, this does prove to me the POWER of FD-ISR even when it's files had been adversely affected and rendered some of them useless.

Also inspires the absolute urgency AND neccessity of also always keeping BACKUP IMAGES of the whole shooting match just against such surprise catastrophic events.

 

Learn something new every day.

Although I do keep my archives on a separate HD, I was almost tempted to keep them on the same drive - but different partition. I can see the wisdom of using a separate drive altogether for archives and images, which is what I do now, but more by luck than judgement.
Never thought about the common partition table before. Thanks for that.

 

If your primary is corrupted, assuming your secondary is similar, boot to your secondary and update your primary from your secondary. Like it never happened.

 

Sometimes things happen completely out-of-the-blue and for me anyway, when i least expect any dangers.

Ouch (Indeed!)

Although most those snapshots work, the file system still is not exactly 100% functional as before i noticed, so i'm going to have to move a lot of work off from that affected 200Gbx2 partition drive and totally D-Ban it hard & wipe the platter clean,then reinstall the O/S again anew.

Since i do occasionally run programs that i'm unfamiliar with, this next time i'm going to have to "HIDE" any other partitions, to keep this from ever occuring again. Plus i think i'll partion in half this time and start running incrementals/differential images.

It could have been a total wash out of over a years worth of work & collections if it had been a virus of some sort instead of program code corruption. Just like i've said time and time again many times before, and experienced more times than i like, legitimate software programs have caused me more problems (DOWNTIME) (EXTRA WORK), than any spyware ever has, and it continues to be the case.

 

Say that again. Since I have my new computer (March 2006) all my problems were caused by installing and trying legitimate softwares. I always have an image ready to restore my system, when I try new softwares. Usually my boot-to-restore fixes the problem, but I needed ATI a few times to fix it.

 

Thanks to DiscWizard for Seagate, i found renewed satisfaction in that ATI is a great program for my Seagate Drive, works like a charm, but this one is a Maxtor. Next time i'm going to IMAGE with (2) different backup programs and prevent my trusting attitude from getting too far out of hand.

Because like you already know ErikAlbert, these legit softwares can pose a REAL SEVERE RISK and especially at the worst possible times, when you're really busy at something.