TI 9 Reading Drive Not Specified in Task

I have several tasks scheduled for full and incremental backups using TI 9.0, build 3677. The backups consist of all contents of my C: and D: drives to my E: drive. Occaionally I get an error that stops the backup until I respond to the Retry/Ignore/Abort dialog. However the error refers to trying to read a sector on another drive that is not supposed to be a part of ANY of my backups.

TI 9 finds four disks on my PC: C, D, E, and K. They are defined as follows:

• Disk 1 is C: drive - Only Windows XP Pro and Program Files.
  
• Disk 2 is D: drive - All data and media files.
  
• Disk 3 is E: drive - E: is a drive that is dedicated to backups only.
  
• Disk 4 is K: drive - This is a USB Flash drive that contains a utility program that I use, and is almost always inserted.

I have never backed up K: drive, nor do I intend to using TI 9. It is a relatively small USB Flash drive that is simple enough to just copy directly to a backup location. Nothing changes very often on that drive, so I do not need a regular image taken.

When my scheduled backup generates the disk error, it stops my backup until I respond. Of course the backup tasks occur in the wee hours of the morning so I do not see them until I arise and sit at my PC later in the day. I don't want Acronis to even look at that drive - there is nothing good that can happen there! Yet the error messages in the log always says:

"Failed to read data from the disk.
Failed to read from the sector 127,408 of the hard disk 4: Retry/Ignore/ignore All/Cancel"

Why is TI 9 even looking at this drive, let alone pausing my backup until I tell it what to do? My scheduled tasks all describe backing up Disks 1 and 2 to Disk 3 - Disk 4 has never been selected in any backup task.

Any help for this?

Thank you.

 

A little help, please.

 

Hi J-Mac,


I don't know the answer to your question, but I wondered if this is a filesystem issue (what size is K and what filesystem), or, if this is a bad sector issue, whether it is possible to explicitly mark it as so or repair it by running chkdsk k: /f

F.

 

File system, I believe, is FAT 32; definitely a FAT system either way - remember this is a USB Flash drive. I'm not even concerned about any bad sectors on it - it is not supposed to be part of the backup at all.

My backup addresses only Disks 1 and 2 (Drives C and D) as sources, and Disk 3 (Drive E) as the destination. Disk 4 (Drive K) is the USB Flash drive that contains a utility program I use, and that I do not wish to back up at all with TI 9. This drive is not mentioned at all in the tasks. I don't know why TI 9 is even looking at it.

I just want to get TI to look only at the drives it is supposed to be looking at!

Have you ever seen this before?

Thanks.

BTW, it is a 64 MB USB Flash drive. Again, it is NOT supposed to be involved in the backup at all.

 

I would expect ATI to scan all devices - at least at when it starts up.

Edit: Just checked my logs. My scheduled backup from C: to Z: "analyses" all of my seven partitions. This is not your problem - which is why I suspect there is some issue with your flash stick.

F.

 

Hello J-Mac,

foghorne is correct - TI scans all connected IDE, SATA, SCSI and USB drives on startup. As far as I'm aware there is no way to stop this behaviour in the current versions/builds of TI.

I would try copying the data on the USB flash drive to temporary location, then reformat the drive and copy the data back again. If that doesn't get rid of the error, try substituting with a different flash drive.

Regards

 

That's poor design. Why would ATI have any need to scan a drive on which it has not been requested to perform any operation? If I do not include the drive in any backup job, then the application should not be permitted to suspend all operations until I tell it to ignore the "error".

The USB Flash drive has no impact whatsoever on any of my backups within ATI.

BTW, I submitted this to Acronis support but have not received a response to date. They are getting a bit slower with their support, it seems.

That's not going to happen. The drive comes with the utility already installed. It is a proprietary program that is keyed to the device number of the drive itself - it is a process that the developer apparently worked out with Sandisk. If copied to another drive of any kind, the program will check once to ensure it is being run from that same flash drive, and when it confirms it is a different device, it "shreds" the code, thus rendering all data unreadable. (I tried it once - the USB drive was plastic and cracked and I tried moving the contents to a Titanium drive. Had to have the company overnight me a new one).

Besides, I don't believe that there are truly any bad sectors on the drive. The scheduled backups have run for 33 days (two daily tasks, and two weekly), and the error messages in the ATI log have only appeared on three of those days. Yet the data on the USB flash drive had not changed at all - it is read from, not written to, most of the time. So either the bad sectors are always there and ATI only managed to notice it on three of 33 days, or there is no bad sector at all and ATI does not see what it is scanning correctly. Whatever the case, the program on the USB flash drive has never so much as hinted about any data errors due to bad sectors. It has run flawlessly for several months without a hitch.

Since ATI only sees it on rare occasions, I would have to conclude that the problem is not with the drive, but with how ATI is looking at it.

Though it shouldn't matter at all anyway. Why would a backup of other drives be stopped because it thinks it sees a bad sector on a non-related drive? I could more easily understand it noting what it perceives as a bad sector on a drive not related to the backup it is performing, just for my knowledge. And only stopping a backup if it is trying to perform a backup that involves that drive. But why would it stop backups of other drives?

So are you saying that if a user has, say three internal hard drives - as I do - and an external drive, and the external drive has a "bad sector" detected by ATI, no more backups can continue? Even if they do not involve the external drive? I would think that the forum here would contain a number of threads from bewildered users if they were experiencing that.

Some people stick with a hard disk with minimal bad sectors for a long time, if it is a large drive and it is not affecting their data - and just as important, if they cannot easily afford to replace the drive immediately.

 

I just rechecked my info. Instead of 33 backup tasks, this actually covers 50 backup tasks over the last 20 days. (The 13 days prior to that were my previous scheduled tasks; I changed my backup strategy starting on Oct 5.)

And in 50 separate scheduled backup tasks over the course of 20 days, this error appeared - and the related backup tasks stopped - on 4 occasions. So this "bad sector" issue is being seen by ATI in 8% of the backups.

I cannot think of anything different going on during those tasks. All are run when I am not at the PC and most other applications are not running. (Kaspersky AV6 and Counterspy are running in the background, though). EDIT - I should have said that KAV6 and Counterspy are active in the background, but not necessarily "running" an actual scan.

I have a little more checking to do to see if any paricular activity shows in either KAV6's or Counterspy's logs that correspond with the exact time of the ATI errors - that'll take a bit of most undesired log reading on my part. But I will post back with anything pertinent that I find.

Thanks.

 

Well I can't say for sure, but Counterspy may have been scanning for spyware for at least part of the same times that ATI threw out those error messages. It's hard to confirm, because most of the errors in ATI show the time that I responded to the error message as opposed to the actual time that the backup stopped and waited for my response. (Which I find to be odd!)

For example, on Oct 23, all the errors are timed after 11:00 AM, even though the backup tasks started at 5:00 AM. The error time is actually when I sat at the PC and saw that the backup was awaiting Retry/Ignore/Abort instructions from me. While I responded then, the backup really stopped more than six hours earlier. So the log apparently doesn't get written to about the error until the time of the resolution.

The Counterspy scans would have possibly had a small overlap with the start of the backup tasks - but only on certain days. Oddly enough, the Event Viewr shows no application errors at all at the times of the problemsome ATI backup error messages.

If this is a conflict with Counterspy causing false readings, why would ATI see bad sectors only on the USB flash drive and no others? BTW, I did scan the flash drive and can find no errors on it.

 

So this is not a standard storage device then. It is likely that part of its address space is logically overlaid with other circuitry (I have something similar which acts as dongle for a windows program).

What I expect is happening here is that ATI is trying to scan it and the proprietary hardware contained within is interfering with it.

I think you would be lucky if you got a solution in the short term.

F.

 

The K drive ,which Windows sees as a fixed drive instead of removable storage, could be unplugged until it is actually needed. Then surely this problem would go away.

Xpilot

 

I imagine that would work, Xpilot.

However since I have scheduled backup tasks running in the wee hours daily (two full backups monthly on the 1st and 15th of the month, and two incremental backups every day), I know that I will not remember to remove it every night.

I am home almost all the time - disabled - and I am the only user of my systems, so I don't have the same security needs I once had. I used to take this USB drive with me on travel. Now I could actually install the program directly to the hard drive, however I would then need three licenses, while this drive allows for five different PC's at home. And since I already have that 5 seat license, I don't want to purchsae the individual ones over again - they're fairly expensive.

Plus, since this has only occurred 4 times in 50 backups, I can't help but to suspect some other source of conflict. If I can find that, all should be OK.

I'm just surprised to learn that ATI tries to read all drives whether they are included in the backup or not. That feature (or bug, depending on one's particular frame of reference) must cause a lot of aborted backup jobs. And to no apparent benefit that I can see.

 

I see your logic, but I can imagine how the strategy of enumerating and scanning all disks strategy has evolved. Once this functionality is in place I suggest there has been no reason to remove it. The only time I can remember a similar problem was where ATI (v8 I think) threw up a dialogue box whenever it saw a card reader without a card in, saying it could not read from sector 0. This was fixed.

If you really want a resolution to this I suggest you raise a support request. Acronis tend to lag handling comments in this forum by around 3 weeks, and if they stumble on your post they will only ask you to submit a support request anyway.

F.