tib's Validate From HDD, Reported Corrupted From CD

When I check my .tib files from my hard drive they are reported to be fine. Also, I can mount them. But when I boot from the recovery CD and try to validate them they are reported to be corrupted. If I had a true emergency I would have to use the recovery CD and would be up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Since I can mount the image files and since they also validate from the hard drive it appears that the files are actually all right. So what can I do to get the recovery CD to read them?

 

What version and build of True Image?
Where are the .tib files stored?
Did you try the Validate in Safe mode or Full mode?
Did you try the quiet=acpi noapic tip?

A workaround might be to make the BartPE cd that has the True Image plug-in.

 

Thanks for your reply. I'm running version 10.0 build 4,192. The .tib files are stored on a USB 2 HDD of 186 GB capacity that is pretty much dedicated to this backup purpose. Is Safe Mode available from the recovery CD? I'll have to look up the tip you mention. I've never heard of it. I'll look into the BartPE CD. I have a copy but have never used it.

 

Couple possibilities:
1. Create a backup archive from the Rescue Cd and see if it validates.
2. Temporarily copy a backup set of *.tib files from the external into a folder on the internal drive and see if the REscue CD validates it that way.

 

Since the backups validate in Windows, they are good. The question is why they don't validate from the Recovery CD which runs in Linux in Full mode. It's probably because the Linux drivers for your USB chipset aren't acceptable. Unfortunately, you can't do anything about that. Perhaps a new build of TI will fix the problem, but that's for the future.

The Safe mode of the Recovery CD may aor may not be able to see your USB drive. Give it a try. It uses the BIOS functions to access the drives, and that should be good if it works.

The acpi noapic tip sometimes fixes problems like this so it's worth trying. The second sticky at the top of the forum explains this.

Copying a backup image to an internal hard drive will also test whether that is a workaround for a USB problem.

Let us know what you find out.

 

Grover & John:

Thanks for your replies. I am scheduled for a colonoscopy in the morning. If you are familiar with that procedure you will know what I have been doing all day; if not, I'll mercifully spare you the details. So it will be a while before I can try your suggestions, but I fully intend to do so soon, and will report back as soon as there is something to report. It takes about two hours for the Recovery CD to load. I suppose it is taking that long to read all my hard drives. In any case it is a major undertaking just to get it up and running. --bilby.

 

You have my sympathies. I hope things go well tomorrow.

I'm glad you mentioned how long it takes to boot from the Recovery CD. Wow! It normally takes less than five minutes even with several drives in the system.

Would you check the build number on your version of TI 10. The current build is 4942. If you don't have that build, register your copy of TI and download the current build. To be on the safe side, uninstall the old version before installing the new version. Then create a new Recovery CD and try it.

 

I apparently misread the build number when I reported it earlier - I do have the latest, viz. 4942. I re-ran the image verification from the recovery CD and this time it did verify. So the worst problem seems to have disappeared. BUT it took forever to accomplish a validation. It was only about 12 minutes until the first screen appeared, where I chose the full version. It then took a long, long time to load that. I watched it for about 30 minutes, but, fearing that the "Please wait ..." and the little clock would get burned into my retinas (need a retina blanker?), I did something else for a while and it had loaded when I came back. I would guess it took at least an hour. Then it took a similarly long time for the Backup Archive Validation Wizard to load with the drives and .tib's listed. When the validation started the progress bar said three hours, it quickly dropped to two hours, but I suspect it really took that long. So I'm estimating that it took a total of about four hours to get one 8 GB archive verified. Is this reasonable, or is something wrong? I'm not sure about just how long the verification actually took though, because I left for the colonoscopy at that point. (Results: No cancer, no polyps, come back in ten years.)

I have a lot of drives: C: through I: all on one 125 GB physical drive but each having their own partition. J: is the 186 GB USB external drive that is the target for the backup images. The K: and L: are a little flash memory reader and P: is a partiton on the 125 GB drive for the page file. Q: is a CD reader/writer and R: is a DVD reader. My 1:00 a.m. daily backup images of C:, D:, and E: run about 8 GB and on Sunday I back it all up, making about a 40 GB image. I have two of these 186 GB drives and I switch them every Saturday morning, keeping the idle one in a fire resistant box. I'm giving you all this detail to see if you think this arrangement could account for the excessively long times for ATI to load and verify an image from the recovery CD. Maybe when the recovery CD called my images corrupted it was a fluke, since it didn't repeat. But the long times did repeat. I don't run this over and over to check it because one run takes so long. If I had been in a real emergency when it called all my images corrupt I would have had to change underwear at the very least.

 

Validation of 8GB should only take 4 to 16 minutes depending on your system. Four hours is way too long. TI should boot up in less than five minutes (usually less than two). It must be hanging on something.

As John suggested in Post #5, try the quiet acpi=off noapic option detailed in Section II of the PLEASE READ BEFORE YOU POST thread. See if that helps with the boot-up time. However, since it's taking 12 minutes to even get to the menu where you can enter this option, I suspect the problem lies elsewhere.

The next thing I would try (if you haven't) is to disconnect the flash memory readers. Also disconnect any unnecessary USB or Firewire devices. Just leave your internal and external drives connected.

Have you tried booting into the Safe Mode version of TI? If so, how long did that take? How long to validate the 8GB image (assuming it found the drive with the backup image on it)?

 

I see that you've subsequently had some limited success. Nonetheless, I had this problem once with one particular PC. As someone suggested, it seems to be caused by the recovery CD not having the drivers for your system. It also seemed in my case to have something to do with compression. In my case the recovery CD would validate an uncompressed image file.

Personally, I'd prefer compressed images. My solution was to construct a BartPE recovery disk - that seems to work.

F_P

 

If MudCrab's suggestions on removing all USB devices except the hard drive for the image, etc. don't work, then Ferdinand is correct that it's time to create a BartPE disk.

 

When I ran Safe Mode it loaded like greased lightning, at least by comparison with the full mode. In three minutes from the start the drives were found, the images located and I was starting to verify. Things were looking good. Then the progress bar came on and the time remaining was reported to be 1 day 3 hours. This jumped around, going as high as 2 days, but never lower than the original 1 day 3 hours. After a while of watching this I decided to cancel and try to verify a different archive. This time it told me that the archive I had chosen was not the most recent. I never make incremental backups - they are all complete ones, so this message did not make sense to me. I tried getting out of this and the machine hung. I had to cut off the power before it would reboot.

Next I tried the quiet acpi=off noapic. By the way, is this correct as it is written in the Sticky? Should the letters acpi appear in the same order in both places? This did not seem to have any effect, although I did not wait out the large amount if time needed to be sure.

I looked at the Acronis plugin for BartPE. I couldn't make sense of the instructions. I tried downloading the first file anyway and all I got was a site trying to get me to play online poker. Is there some other way to use BartPE?

 

Yes this is correct as written. No. acpi=off and noapic are different things.

Did you read Mustang's Beginner's Guide to Create a BartPE CD? This is a safe site as are the links that are posted there. You won't be taken to any malware sites.

 

Did you read Mustang's Beginner's Guide to Create a BartPE CD? This is a safe site as are the links that are posted there. You won't be taken to any malware sites.[/QUOTE]

I haven't read it yet. Actually I have a BartPE CD that my son made and sent to me, but I have never used it. Also, I have the BartPE files on my HDD that I downloaded a long time ago but haven't done anything with since my son sent me the CD already made. Something I read on the BartPE site said that I should use the Acronis plugin for the BartPE. That's where I bogged down. Is this plugin really necessary, or can BartPE be used to start the Acronis TI program somehow without the plugin? To use the plugin I think I would have to start over and make a new BartPE CD, right? Right now I'm thinking that the BartPE route is the most promising, but would sure appreciate a little more guidance as to just how to use BartPE to run Acronis TI. I'm sure I won't have any trouble making a BartPE CD, but it's not clear to me what to do with it to run TI once it's made.

 

Yes you will need a BartPE plugin for TI. I recommend Mustang's plugins available at the link I posted earlier. Once you have made your BartPE disk you boot the machine with it. You can run TI by Clicking Go-->Programs-->Acronis TrueImage. The program will launch and you can then choose what you need to do just like windows. You will have to build a CD to use Mustang's plugin or you can try the one on the CD you already have.

 

I seem to recall that I found that the files that Acronis install with TrueImage to allow it to be included on a BartPE Plugin didn't actually work. I downloaded a BartPE TrueImage plugin from a collection of such things, probably Mustang's.

This is making the BartPE thing sound more complex that it really is, but it's not that bad and it's a once only thing. It's a very handy thing to have.

F_P

 

I just finished making my BartPE CD with Acronis plugin. It works like a charm. I'm truly grateful to all who helped me with this, You guys really know your stuff!!

I think those who suggested disconnecting all the extraneous USB stuff may have been on the right track. I have tons of USB. But the prospect of crawling around under my desk in that snake pit of wires, trying to figure out what went where, made any other alternative sound more attractive. That's why I jumped at the BartPE idea. The BartPE disk that my son had made didn't help since it didn't have the Acronis plugin, so I had to start from scratch. The Mustang Acronis plugin had much better instructions than those I first found on the BartPE site. Many thanks for that link.

So, you guys can chalk up another great success story.

 

I'm glad it worked out for you. I find my BartPE CD/Flashdrive to be a great help. Thanks for posting back with your success.

mustang did a great service by creating the guide and plugins. (Thanks, mustang!) The procedure is fairly simple once you've gone through the process, but looks daunting a first glance (especially if you don't have a regular XP SP2 CD available).

 

That should work as long as the computer's BIOS will recognize the flashcard as a USB bootable device. You'll have to try to find out.

Booting usually goes a little faster, but once you get to the BartPE screen, the flashdrive runs many times faster than using the CD.

 

Well, after working on this until about 1:30 am, I finally got ready to run PeToUSB.exe. It reported that it could not find any USB drives even though there are two of them attached to this machine. Could it be because my attempt to make my flash card drive bootable was unsuccessful? Mustang said "5. You will now format the USB drive, make it bootable and copy the BartPE output to the drive." He just says "make it bootable" with no elaboration, as if that's easy and well known how to do, but it baffled me. I found some Microsoft articles on how to make a disk bootable, but I/m not sure I was successful.

So I don't know if the BIOS will work with a USB drive or not since I can't get past the PeToUSB step.

 

If PEtoUSB sees the flash card, then it will make it bootable as part of the copy process (if the checkbox is checked to Enable Disk Format). The "elaboration" is detailed in step 5 after the sentence you quoted.

Perhaps the utility isn't recognizing the card as a "flashdrive" but as some other device. Does it show up if you change the selection to USB Fixed instead of USB Removable?

Was the flashcard formatted to FAT16 with Windows before you ran PEtoUSB?

Out of curiosity, does Acronis Media Builder see the flashcard and display it in the list of destination devices?

You may end up having to use a standard USB flashdrive.

 

No, it does not show up when either fixed or removable is checked.

The flash card was formatted NTFS w/512 byte cluster size.

Yes, Acronis does list it, at least when booted from W2K. I haven't checked that when booted from BartPE.

The fact that PeToUSB makes the disk bootable is good news. That kept me busy for several hours last night trying to figure out how to do it.

So maybe the format is the problem. I'll re-format and try it again. I'll let you know what happens soon. --bilby

 

The format change back to FAT16 did not help. I have some other computers around here. I'll try it on a different machine. Also, I think I'll order a thumb drive. I've had my eye on them for some time now; I just couldn't think of anything I could do better with one. This looks like just the excuse I needed. --bilby

 

I tried using PeToUSB on anther computer with the same result, viz., it reported that it could not find any USB drives. I thought there was a chance that might work because my main machine is loaded to the gills with USB stuff. The one upstairs that I just tried didn't have any USB devices on it until I plugged in this flash card reader with the 2GB card and all the BartPE files on it.

Earlier this evening I placed an order with NewEgg for a 2GB flash drive. As soon as it comes in I'll try PeToUSB on it. If that works, i.e. if I can boot from it, I'm tempted to try putting a complete W2K on one - I see they have 8GB ones available now for under $100 and that's big enough to hold a W2K install. That might be an even better emergency option than BartPE. --bilby