Retrieving corrupt images

Much to my dismay, a series of incs I created with ATI 11 during the initial setup of my Vista system are now reporting that they are corrupt. Because of their importance they were all validated when first created.

I believe the reason may be that they were first created on a different partition, and subsequently copied to their present location. Is this a known cause of corruption? And if I can somehow put them back where they were originally created, might they then work?

 

If they are genuinely corrupted, they are worthless unless you can mount and copy out individual files, but I have found that to be generally frutiless.

When ATI makes a backup, it creates and embeds a checksum code every so often. Whenever it validates, it regenerates checksums for the data and compers to the embedded checksums -- if anytihng is off, then ATI declares the file invalid -- a quite incorrect and misleading decalration. What it should declare is that freshly made checksums don't match the embedded ones. this could be casue the file was corrupted during some copy operation (very rare) or because ATI had aproblem wiritng the file inthe first place or reading the file afterwareds (even thought the file is perfectly fine).

If indeed one of the bits is incorrectly stored in the file, it is indeed corrupt. But sometimes, ATI, say from the Boot disk, might jsut have prob reading a file on your hardware that it created perfectly fine (say from within windows).

 

I would view the problem from a different perspective.

If your system is working as it should why not make a new full image. Then if all is well take it from there and keep a watchfull eye out for any recurring problems.

Xpilot

 

I would run chkdsk X: /r on every partition to make sure there are no bad areas on the disk. Replace X: with the drive letter of the partition being tested.

If the disk is good, the chance of corruption in a file copy operation on internal drives is very low but not zero. There is an increased probablility a TI file will get corrupted, not because it is a TI file, just because they tend to be very large and therefore there is just more data to go wrong. Also, the TI good checksums requirement (4000 checksums/GB of data) is much more stringent than typical apps. If you copied the files to a USB drive or any other media then the risk gets greater.

If you want to ensure that TI files are being copied properly you can do a TI validate after they are copied or you can also use a free checksum calculator. Until you get a handle on just what is going wrong this might be a good idea.

While less likely in your case, bad or marginal RAM can cause corrupt archive errors in TI. You can run free Memtest86+ available from www.memtest.org for at least several passes, overnight is better. Current version is 2.11.

 

The prime suspect I would think. The images were created and validated in March 2008, and were subsequently moved to another drive. However shortly afterward I started getting frequent BSDs and ended up replacing the entire 2GB of RAM. There have been no problems since, neither with ATI 11 nor with anything else.

There is a full archive and four incrementals in the set, and I guess there only needs to be one bit copied wrongly when they were moved for the whole set to be rendered useless.

xpilot I take regular system backups, and also switch images in and out of my partitions, XP and Windows 7 for instance, so there isn't any doubt about the integrity of the system. However the Vista system has over time, and possibly because of the faulty RAM problem, developed a number of persistent software faults, none serious, just irritating, so it was my intention to revert it to a clean but activated install state and take it from there. Looks as if that will not now be possible though.

 

Just a further thought...picking up on Shieber's comment about mounting and copying the files, to my surprise the archives all mount just fine in Windows, even though none of them will validate or restore. So it would possible to copy the files to the target parition, which then would just need its boot sector restored to become bootable.

When I attempt a restore the green bar progresses for about 15% of the way before the corrupt message appears, so I guess it's possible that the boot sector is being restored even though the restore does not complete. The boot sector is definitely being overwritten by the restore attempt.

It's possible to waste huge amounts of time on fruitless efforts with this sort of thing, but can anyone see any reason why this might be a lost cause? Or is it worth a try?

(The real reason I'd rather restore than set Vista up again from scratch is that the image contains a couple of licensed apps which would be costly to purchase again).

 

Can't help you with your specific question but any time I had to "move" to a new PC and wanted to use programs I had purchased I just contacted the publisher with the details of my original purchase, explained I had purchased a new PC (or in the old days had to do a full reformat of the drive) and would like to use the purchased program on it. In every case a new key code was provided at no cost.

Can't hurt to try.

 

That is a useful suggestion, thanks. I would quite like to try my roundabout method of restoring a corrupt archive, but if it fails I'll try your approach next.

 

Copying the files out will most likely not result in a usable system partition.

Since you have Incrementals attached to the base Full image, I would separate them and find out if the error is in the base image or in one of the Incrementals.

For example:

Code:

Full: mybackup.tib
Inc1: mybackup2.tib
Inc2: mybackup3.tib
Inc3: mybackup4.tib
Inc4: mybackup5.tib

Rename the "5" backup to something else ("mybackup5-temp.tib", for example), and try to Validate the image set. If it fails, rename "4" and so on.

 

I like that, and will try it tomorrow. Thanks.

 

Very nice idea, I will have to try to remember that "just in case".

 

Unfortunately the Full is corrupted, so that just leaves me with my longshot of copying the files.

 

So if I boot to the rescue CD, or to VistaPE, and delete all the existing files on my Vista partition, and then copy back the files from my corrupt but mountable image, you don't think it will boot?

Why not?

 

It was fruitless.........