ShadowProtect RE Hardware Independant Restore(HIR) Failing

Hey everyone,

I am having problems restoring an image that I created of another system using ShadowProtect Recovery Environment(RE). I created an image of a Windows XP system that is on a 140gb partition of a 250gb HDD. I have now attempted to restore(using HIR) the image to a 160gb drive on different hardware twice and it has failed both times. With 32 minutes left I heard a single loud click sound, followed by the ETA and progress bar both stopping and no longer moving. I heard this click sound on both failed restore attempts. SP was not frozen though because I could move the mouse and click buttons. After a few minutes of waiting, the restore process finally stopped completely, the status changed to failed, and the error messages came up. After the error messages had come up, I went over to Disk Map to check if SP still see's my drives. SP could still see the drive containing the image(external 640gb SATA), but the destination drive(internal 160gb IDE) was no longer listed in Disk Map.

I'm guessing the error's were caused by this drive suddenly disappearing?? And I'm guessing the loud click sound that I heard was made by this drive when it disappeared?? When I reboot the machine the missing drive can be seen again. Anyway, the error messages are listed below. Could somebody please help me out here? Thanks.

Module: sbrest
Code: 503
Message: Fatal I/O error on \\volume{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx} a44fe1200 on write {-2 The system cannot find the file specified.)

Module: (loader)
Code: 504
Message: Final error (-109 The pipe has been ended.)

Module: sptask
Code: 516
Message: sbrun.exe started successfully but failed to complete the task

 

nineine,

That is annoying. Was SP installed in the 140 GB partition prior to the image being created? Or was it an SP free partition? If SP wasn't installed you can't do a HIR.

 

Yes SP was installed in the 140gb system partition prior to creating the image. I did not enter my key into the SP that I installed, I just left it in trial mode. According to this page, SP does not need to be activated to make HIR work, as long as you have the SP Recovery Environment boot disc.

 

OK. Can you do a normal restore? If that succeeds and the OS doesn't boot you can install IDE mass storage drivers with TBOSDT.

 

I will go and try a normal restore right now. If successful, it should take about an hour, because that was the ETA on the failed attempts. Before I start... what should I choose for "MBR and Track Zero Options" in the SP Restore Wizard? The default turned on options are: Set Partition Active, Restore MBR from the image file, & Restore Disk Hidden Track. I will leave "Use HIR" turned off.

By TBOSDT, do you mean "TeraByte OS Deployment Tool" OR "TeraByte OS Deployment Tool Suite"? I need one of those two and not the Pro paid version right?

 

Set Partition Active, Restore MBR from the image file, & Restore Disk Hidden Track. Also Restore Disk Signature.

The free TBOSDT should be fine. Let me know if the restore succeeds and I'll give you some help with TBOSDT.

 

I decided to go ahead and try the restore without waiting for your reply. I used all of those settings except for Restore Disk Signature. With 38mins and 28secs left, I heard the loud click sound again and the ETA stopped counting down. It stayed this way for 20-30 minutes before the error messages finally showed up, and the restore process stopped. The error messages are similar and more or less the same as the ones in my first post. The drive that the image was being restored to stayed visible in Disk Map after the ETA froze, but it disappeared once the errors showed up and restore process stopped.

 

That is nasty. I'm running out of ideas but that loud click is concerning. Assuming the image is OK (it did pass Verify) maybe there is a problem with the target HD. Do you have another to try?

With WinXP it doesn't really matter if you don't restore the Disk Signature.

 

I do have another one, but it is only an 80gb drive. The size of the imaged partition is 140gb, although only 80gb of space was used up on it.

For some reason I remember the first two failed attempts stopping at a similar ETA to this one. I am gonna go and run the restore one more time to see when it freezes this time.

 

So I attempted to restore it again(using your all of your recommended settings), and this time it failed with an ETA of about 31 minutes. Therefore the theory in my previous post is false.

I did some more digging and found out that it is possible to shrink the image using SP. However the image can only be shrunk to the last track where data exists on the volume. I used this feature and only managed to shrink the image from 140gb to 134gb, which isn't going to make any difference for my situation. It's a disappointing difference in size because I even performed a defrag on the system before creating the image originally.

 

Sorry I didn't realize that I might have caused a misunderstanding with the way that I described the sound. The loud click sound IS from the drive(or other hardware) and NOT from SP.

Great idea BTW! I will try WD's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for DOS on the drive.

 

sounds like a drive issue to me as well.

 

I just got done with running the diagnostics on the drive. DLGDiag for DOS did not detect any errors when I ran the Extended Test.

 

Well, things are getting desperate now. Can you put the target HD in another computer and try to restore the image. In general we shouldn't do this because of geometry issues but it may work.

What else can cause a HD to emit a click? Sudden power loss from a faulty power supply? But the computer doesn't reboot. I don't know.

 

Okay so I've figured out what the problem was. The 160gb IDE drive that I was restoring the image to, was connected as the slave and no drive was connected as the master. I didn't think that this would matter, because the drive jumpers were set to cable select. Doh! Oh, and I also previously had installed Windows 7 onto this drive while it was slave with no master connected. I never had a problem installing it, but anyway that problem is solved. Onto the next one.....

So I did a restore with SP using HIR and that was successful. But now I can't boot to the drive, whether it is connected as slave alongside another drive, or as master by itself. I followed the instructions from this PDF file, to setup and run HIR.

I set the destination drive's(160gb IDE HDD) Partition Start Alignment to "Sector". I made sure no other drives were assigned the letter "C" using diskpart(included in SP RE). I right clicked on the unallocated space of the destination drive and clicked on "Create exact Primary Partition at the beginning of free space". I turned on the following MBR & Track Zero Options/HIR Options: "Set Partition Active", "Restore MBR", "Restore Original Windows MBR", "Restore Disk Signature", "Restore Disk Hidden Track", & "Use HIR". Under HIR options I clicked on Advanced, added the folder "\Programs\DriversLibrary", and clicked OK. Then I let it restore, and it completed the restore and HIR process successfully.

Now when I set the drive as the primary boot device, the following message shows up on a black screen:
"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information."

 

That is a boot.ini message. You get this error when boot.ini on the active partition is pointing to an empty MBR slot (is pointing to a non-existent partition, rather than the one where Windows is installed)

In SP correct your boot.ini. There have been several threads lately where SP has created an incorrect boot.ini.

 

There we go, that did it. I had to change both entries of rdisk(1) to rdisk(0) in the boot.ini. Now it is booting into XP just like it's supposed to. What I have to do now is install all of the drivers for this system. Do old drivers need to be uninstalled, and do you know how I would go about doing this?

BTW Brian K, zfactor, & Peter2150, I really appreciate you guys helping me out. Couldn't have done it without you. Thanks a lot!

 

nineine,

Congratulations on the standard of your posts. Your clear expression makes understanding the issues much easier.

SP has a problem with its unwanted editing of boot.ini

 

And it's threads like this that keep me coming back to Wilders. Thanks for the feedback guys, this is actually the first time I've heard of this issue. I do know that the boot.ini patching code was recently changed, and so I'll discuss this issue with the other involved engineer on Monday. I have an idea already as to the cause (I ran into something like this several years back and had to adjust the old boot.ini patching code to accommodate it (it is a rare case)).

 

will a new version soon to come then to fix this or maybe wait for the next one?

 

Nate,

Here are recent threads relating to boot.ini problems.


http://forum.storagecraft.com/Community/forums/p/2623/12729.aspx

http://forum.storagecraft.com/Community/forums/t/2567.aspx

http://forum.storagecraft.com/Community/forums/p/2661/12953.aspx

 

@zfactor

We'll fix this in the next version. As I said, I'll discuss it with the other engineer (there are two of us who are involved with that particular code) on Monday. As to when the fix releases, well that depends. It won't be immediate, unfortunately.

@Brian

Thanks for the links, they'll prove useful. I try to digest the forum content a couple of times per week but I do miss things. I have code to write so monitoring the forums is something I often do from home (as I'm doing with Wilders right now). I've found a lot of useful ideas, and good feedback, here and in our forums, over the years. You guys actually have a very high impact on product development direction.

 

great to hear. ill look forward to it in the next release hopefully

 

Yup, definitely in the next release. As I said, we'll review this issue on Monday, which means code will be written for this on Monday.