SATA drives and Errors - Read this.

Thanks for the helpful suggestions some have given.

I have spent a lot of time to sort out backups to removable hard drives, in fact testing over 1 week and lots of stress.

The problem eventually turned out to be a BIOS issue and SATA drives. The mother board is a Gigabyte GA-IEPE1000 Pro 2 but I guess it applies to all motherboards with onboard SATA.

I had problems with Retrospect 6.5, Norton Ghost 9 and Acronis True Image 8

Forget about Norton as they have non existent support.

To cut the story very short if you are using SATA drives DON’T use PATA (Standard IDE drives) The SATA drives need to show up as IDE 0 Primary and IDE 0 Secondary. This is using the onboard controller.

Don’t think about SATA raid either. I tried and again problem.

You can use a Raid Card but turn the raid array off and just use the extra channels but again I went through 3 cards to get one to work. It seems most SATA cards come with RAID 0 / 1 even if ordered as non raid cards!

I did eventually find a way to get the old Serial ATA drive working but trust me if you are using SATA make sure all your drives are SATA.

Ok I have the following setup that works fault free.

1 x SATA 80G Seagate on IDE Channel 0 Primary for Boot
1 x SATA 200G Seagate on IDE Channel 1 Secondary for Data
1 x SATA 200G Seagate on Silicone image Raid controller with raid disabled and connected to a SATA hot swap bay for quick removal and backup.

All drives switched back to allow write cache as it is faster and made no difference in the end.

Maybe someone can answer on SATA and hot swap. The drive bay was sold as hot swap which works in the fact that the drive will plug and play hot but does not show as a removable device. You must make sure all writing is done before removing the drive as write cache can not be turned off. If any one knows about hot swap SATA and how to have true plug and play like USB Drives let me know.

I hope this is of help to anyone experiencing frustration as we move from the old ATA drives to the newer SATA drives.