Some questions about Rollback RX

Some conflicting programs may not be obvious. For example, a recent Wilders thread on Process Lasso got me interested and I found that it definitely does something that EF/RB doesn't like!

All that I can say is that I typically do a shutdown every night. Why not try doing that? You also may have incurred a 'dirty' uninstall-reinstall, so you may want to try doing it again (per my last reply below).

The existance of multiple partitions by themselves shouldn't be a problem, but I'm sure that Dell has modified the MBR to run their emergency restore and that just might produce a conflict.

No.

You do have adequate free-space on your C-partition, correct? If so, I suggest uninstalling RB, do a thorough cleanup and running a comlete error-check of your C-partition. After the partition is reported to be in good shape defrag it and custom-install RB, selecting to protect just the C-partition.

Good luck,
Aaron

 

I have also changed the configuration of my hard drive from the factory default M1530 and removed all the Dell garbage. One question, do you shutdown your laptop or put it to sleep? I think that is most likely causing my troubles. I may be wrong.

Well, I get an error saying the "file system on C partition is corrupt run chkdsk to correct the problem" or I can not save anything on my C drive and receive message "could not save, file system is corrupt". Windows event viewer also logs NTFS errors, saying the file system is corrupt.
I only used Goback for a week and did not pursue the matter, so it might not be Gobacks fault. RAM was a factor too as I had limited RAM on the system I installed GoBack on and when the MFT problem occurred I just decided not to use Goback.

I have not used any imaging program or booted my computer from an external media since Rollback install.

I am waiting for some sort of response on a discussion thread on Horizon forum. The guy appears to be having similar problems as mine here http://horizondatasys-forum.com/rollback-rx/59-check-disk-inconsistancies.html

I have checked and do not have any low level process running on my computer. I will keep an eye out in case I have missed anything.

I have looked into the multiple partition thing and rollback appears to be aware of all three of my partitions including the hidden one. It lists only C: as protected. So, that might not be the cause of my problem. I have not used the service partition since installing rollback.

I am using only 20 GB of my 45 GB space on my C: drive. Before I installed RB I did de-fragmentation and ran chkdsk but I will try it again.

I think I my problem might be caused due to putting the computer to sleep mode instead of shutting down. I will try and see if this corrects the problem and report back.

Last thing how big the snapshots typically are? On my 45 GB (20 GB full) drive the baseline was 160 MB but after that most snapshots are between 350-500 MB mark with at least five going above 1500 MB. For example, I uninstalled Office 2003 and installed office 2007 the next snapshot was 1999 MB. Is this normal behavior? For some reason I do not think just a snapshot of my changed MFT could be this large. I did learn of a bug in v8.1 that has been corrected in v9 which produces extraordinary large snapshot size here http://www.horizondatasys.com/177440.ihtml

Thanks for taking the time to respond guys.....

 

sometimes i shutdown my laptop, most of the time on sleep mode....no probs at all.

 

Ditto here. Ran GoBack from v3 (Roxio) to v4.2 (Symantec) runing chkdsk regularly and never experienced a problem. So far AFAIK RB Rx has not caused an issue in this area...but it is early days.

Not sure that is correct but I could be wrong. As far as I know the only recommendation re. uninstalling RB Rx is before a defragusing a 3rd party defragger, even though there is a command line switch that is supposed to allow yo to do so without uninstalling first. Have tried both but more on that later.

That is correct! But also you could try posting at the RB Rx forum which is not extremely active but that is not from a lack of wanting it to by the HDS management.

http://horizondatasys-forum.com/rollback-rx/

There are a couple of members fo staff who frequent the forum and have been very helpful to me in terms of responding to some questions officially, etc.

Not trying to pinch poster from here but it is some times worth spreading the enquiries a little...IYKWIM

I frequent and enjoy both!

 

I am pretty sure there have been a number of posts warning that if you image with RB installed when you restore with the image the MBR will be messed up. You would have to run FIXMBR (or something like that) in order to get the PC working.

A rep from Horizon indicated that only RBs own imager understands snapshots so ,,,,,,,,

That being said there have been posts indicating that if you use a sector by sector image option with a 3rd party program it will pick up everything and a restore using the image will be fine.

I tend to prefer to err on the side of caution so I will uninstall and reinstall between 3rd party images.

 

Raza0007,

It sure sounds like your C-partition is corrupted. Therefore, your best bet is to uninstall RB and clean-up the partition (as I suggested above). Also, your MBR may contain orphaned entries from Dell, GoBack and RB, so it wouldn't hurt to do a FIXMBR (which installs a standard Windows MBR) before re-installing RB.

The bottom-line is that the system partition has to be 'clean' before installing RB.

Aaron

PS. RB or no RB, regular backup images are your last line of defense - But you most certainly do not have to uninstall RB to reliably do that!

 

I will do this as a last resort. Are my snapshot sizes (previous post) acceptable? typically what size should one get on a 45 GB (20 GB full) Vista drive with 2-3 snapshots a day and normal windows use?

Thanks....

 

RB's snapshot sizes are directly proportional to the file and app changes that it sees after the prior snapshot and has little to do with the overall volume size or free space (just be careful you never allow your storage to get to the point where your free space isn't sufficient for RB's snapshots and optimization process)!

PS. Imho, you should take my clean-up suggestion as a first resort. Considering your issues, it just makes good sense to do that!

 

If you want the so called "granny" version of Rollback Rx.
Then i suggest old back in track v2.7. Its only 4mb in size. Its a system restore in steroids. I unistalled Zone-alarm with it and reverted back without any probs.

 

I will do that over the weekend

 

The actual process of Rollback works fine. I have successfully rolled back my system to an earlier state 3 times over the past 10 days without encountering any problems. It is just this "file system corruption" problem which props up after every 2 days. might be a function of the number of snapshots taken. For me it would be 6-7 over a period of 2 days. It is not serious and all I need to do is to run chkdsk and everything seems to be fine.

 

There's no process. You can defrag. Like i said before, its system restore in steroids and you can revert it via MBR boot menu.

Like i said, only one boot recovery restore. Go to windows and make a snapshot.

Yes its quite lame but works for grannies that does not want to click too much.

 

Okay, after pouring through my "Event Viewer" trying to figure out the cause of my chkdsk and Rollback Rx problem I came across this event under "Windows Logs" "Application" listed as "Level = Information" "Source = ShieldClientService". Below is what it says:

[[Description:
The description for Event ID 200 from source ShieldClientService cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

ShieldClientService: 0.
begin client

The specified resource type cannot be found in the image file]]

This event has been triggering multiple times since 19th march the day I first installed Rollback Rx.

Now, ShieldClientService is an integral part of Rollback and the strange thing is even after this message the ShieldClientService is in fact running as a service on my computer.

This may be just a false positive error so I wanted to ask someone who has vista and rollback rx to please check their window application logs and see if they are getting this error too. If not then this is most likely causing my file system corruption error. I will uninstall Rollback, rebuild vista MBR, run chkdsk and then reinstall Rollback. Hopefully that will solve my problem.

Thanks....

 

i don't have that on my Event Viewer.

Btw, did you submit ticket to Horizon re:ShieldClientService error message?

 

Hi Raza

Sounds like a plan. But I would also go to the HDS website and dwnload a new copy of the v9 install package...just in case there is something 'strange' with the one you have...a long shout but it does not hurt to take the precaution...just a little extra band width

If that does not reolve your issue then I would recommend that you post what you have found above on the HDS forum. There are couple of techs there who have been helpfull recently and they may just be able to provide some support.

Regards



Balders

 

Well, then it appears to be a problem do to a bad install. I will just do a fresh clean install. No, I did not submit a ticket but I am following a discussion thread dated 27th march by another guy who appears to be having similar problem as mine but he has not been responded to yet by the support staff. There will be no point in posting another similar looking problem. This ShieldClientService error looks to be a corrupt installation issue and I would like to solve it on my own before bothering a lot of people on Horizon support page. I hope I am not bothering you guys

Yes, I will try to find a copy of v8.1 from their website. It is sure to be there carefully hidden. I will attempt the procedure in my previous post over the weekend as I do not want to spend time during weekdays if something goes wrong. I need my PC till Friday night.

OH! A question open to anyone, I heard you can use the same product ID of Rollback 8.1 with Eaz-Fix 8.1? Is this true? As I have a copy of Eaz-Fix that I downloaded a couple of months ago, I do not know which build as I have not installed it. Because if it does then Eaz-fix should be able to successfully activate with the activation code of rollback 8.1 already embedded in my hard drive. Let me know.

 

No it's not true.

 

No, that's not true.

 

Why don't you just log a support ticket explaining your need for it and see if they are willing to make a copy available. The license for each version is lifetime and not transferable to the next...therefore you should reasonably expect them to help you out on this as they have only just surplanted v8.1 with v9.

Failing that you could try a post on theor forum and if you get no joy from that as well I would be happy to wade in and try to help.

 

Thanks for the offer..... I noticed just now that in the discussion entry "Check Disk Inconsistencies" posted by Stu on Horizon forum, the only response is from someone named "Baldrick". Is that you?

Don't worry, I know how to handle horizon staff but I am not at that point yet. The copy I am using I downloaded it from their website 2 months ago, only got around to installing it on 19th, I am confident there is nothing wrong with the installation file. If my uninstall and reinstall does not work I will most definitely post at the Horizon forum.

I have just uninstalled Rollback and ran "prefect disk analysis" on my rollback protected C drive. Here is the image link

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/7219/defragi.jpg

Since I ran defrag before installing rollback and had zero fragmentation so 2.3% in 13 days is okay for my standard. I wanted to point out one anomaly though. Look at the attached image and see the "Red Color boxes". I marked "Boot" as Red and well, they are all over the place. I do not have an image of before I installed rollback but I remember quite clearly that my "Boot" "MFT" MFT Zone" were only present at the front of drive, top left corner. I know how rollback works but still it is rather alarming that boot sectors are all over my drive in 13 days! Also a new MFT Zone has been created at the end part of the drive.

Is this normal behavior?

Doesnt it compromise system performance?

Any comments will be welcome

 

Thats me

I am sure that you can but just in case...

I don't think so...but to be honest I have never seen this before...although I am not surprised by the additional MFT Zone (and assume that you know that this and the MFT are in fact different)

I would have thought that it does given what I understand the MFT does (as all the individual 'bits' of MFT may need to be searched and rather than one continous area to search the arms have to hope from 'bit' to 'bit'.

But seriously from what I know about RB Rx and how it is supposed to work I cannot understand how it would be the cause of this as it only records where data is, and does not actually move it per se.

 

But Chkdsk does have the ability to move data. I have run chkdsk at least 7 times in the last 12 days due to the file system corruption error. Going over the long chkdsk logs, I can see entries like deleting corrupt records, recovering lost files, recovering orphan files, inserting data attribute etc.

I am guessing every time chkdsk found corrupt data it moved it to a new place. I am not saying that I have a bad sector there, I am sure I do not, but this is how chkdsk is designed. Move data to a new place.

Now, I need to run a boot time defrag to defrag my boot files. I am hesitant to do that without making a backup first and I am not sure what perfect disk will do when it finds 20-30 boot sectors all over the partition. Usually there is only one boot sector (or probably two) at the start of the partition. Perfect disk might well suffer a nervous breakdown when it looks at my partition

lets see if I can correct this problem using paragon partition manager from outside of windows. anyway, I have Rollback to thank for all this mess

 

Wow ..

I Also had this problem a few days ago however didnt assocate it with rollback :/

It Started with outlook 2007 email .. outlook said my pst corrupted ..
then weird things with files not deleting .. then other problems corrupted files.

So .. then started checking the log files in vista .. said stuff like HD was corrupted ... run checkdisk.

allowing checkdisk to run and allowing the hundreds(and hundreds) of checkdisk "corrections" only to find that many of my files didnt work any more

I am also using Avast AV .. wonder if thats the problem :/
I have never had this problem ever with this computer till i installed rollback 9.0

I was able to use the org. baseline to "rollback" and then recover most of my files! ( thank god ) however the files Docs and pst file ect. that were "new" ( after baseline ) were still no good

" The behaviour of Rollback seems to be stable when first installed. As I use it over time (weeks and months) problems creep in slowly eg. a program i installed 5 snapshots ago suddenly stops working. Its been working in everyone of those snapshots till now. I rollback and still no good. I rollback to before the program was installed, install again and then everything seems normal for now. Some snapshots later another software mysteriously stops working? In the mean time corrupted data files creep in that force me to rollback to good snapshots again (resulting in loss of data since the snapshot taken when rolling back contains the corrupted file so no zero point recovery there!) . Its just a never ending nightmare. "

That what seemed to happen to me too !

I have no idea what happened .. but after reading what happened to you.
I am now sure its a problem with rollback and or something with rollback
and some other program not liking each other.

After my "rollback" to org. baseline and uninstalling rollback
all my problems went away .. no corrupted HD .. ran check disk no problems found!

I have uninstalled .. and now everything is AOK for about 4 days now

 

Sure sounds like there is a problem with the latest version of RollBack ,,,,,, I am glad that even though I got an upgrade licence (free since the new version was released shortly after I purchased I have not actually upgraded from 8. I think I will stick with what I have been using, no point in asking for trouble.

 

Sure sounds like there is a problem with the latest version of RollBack ,,,,,, I am glad that even though I got an upgrade licence (free since the new version was released shortly after I purchased 8 ) I have not actually upgraded from 8. I think I will stick with what I have been using, no point in asking for trouble.