Yet another Error 00070020

I recently discovered that DriveImage was creating invalid backups, so I bought TI Home. Unfortunately, it also seems to be creating busted archive files.

The is under XP SP2 + MS maintenance fixes since then, on a 1GB Asus/Athlon with two ATA drives.

Symptoms are that every backup I create under WXP gives an error 00070020 when I try to Verify the archive. I tried booting into the recovery environment from CD, and it first gave the same error when I selected Verify after backup, but then gave a successful verify when I Verified it separately from the backup operation.

My error log shows errors:
eventid 32 - "The description for Event ID ( 32 ) in Source ( Acronis True Image Home ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event:
The archive is corrupted: None."

then error eventid 502 - "The description for Event ID ( 502 ) in Source ( Acronis True Image Home ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: Operation with partition "0-0" was terminated.
Details:<indent>Image corrupted (0x70020) Tag = 0x82DB9339B70C3AFC</indent>.

and then eventid 5: "The description for Event ID ( 5 ) in Source ( Acronis True Image Home ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: Operation has completed with errors.."

Now the curious part is that ntBackup.exe also shows a errors when I try to use it for a backup - the error appears during post-backup verification:
Error 5013: "Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Shadow Copy writer ContentIndexingService called routine VsServiceChangeState which failed with status 0x80070424 (converted to 0x800423f4).
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp."

I've tried everything listed in this thread http://www.2brightsparks.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=932 and all the linked articles, and got VSS apparently working, but the error persists, and the ntbackup log shows a random selection of files that don't match, which changes from verify to verify.

I have no idea what's going on, but I am extremely nervous to not have any image backup that seems to work completely.

Any ideas? I'd sure like to get ITH working reliably before I have a disaster.

 

Probably a common reason all your backup programs are failing.

What device are you saving your archives to? Another partition on the same physical HD, second internal HD, external USB HD, DVD?

Run chkdsk X: /r on ALL your partitions be sure to include the external HD partitions if you are using an external. Substitute the drive letter of the partiton being tested for X. A reboot will be required to check C.

Run a memory diagnostic such a Memtest86+ V1.7 available free from www.memtest.org . Let it run for several full passes minimum and if it doesn't show an error let it run overnight.

TI uses checksums to determine if an archive is corrupt. A checksum or sums is created when the archive is made based on the data contained in the archive. When the archive is validated the archive file is opened and the contents read and the checksum recalculated. It must agree with the values stored in the archive or the archive is declared corrupt. It only takes 1 bad bit in a multi-gigabyte archive to render the archive corrupt. Your hardware has to be in perfect condition. It is possible to run your PC doing normal activities and not realize you have bad memory. It just depends on where the bad locations are and what, if anything, is being stored there.

TI is known to give memory and disk systems a good workout.

 

And keep in mind that those Verify results could ALL be incorrect - yes, even the positive ones. So if you have the resources, i.e. a spare hard drive, restore a backup to it and see if the drive will boot correctly.

 

I'm trying to backup to a second internal SATA drive. I've run chkdsk /r and /f repeatedly on all my partitions, both source and target - no errors at all.

Actually, the part that I found most unusual is that it seems to work OK from the Recovery CD, which would seem to indicate that the issue might be with XP, rather than hardware.

I'll try running memtest overnight, just for the exercise, but I've never seen an error when doing so.

As you might guess, I'm reluctant to test restore over my running system.

If I had yet a third hard drive, I'd just do a sector copy, and wouldn't worry about compressed backups - I like to keep several back versions available for recovery, as I'm well aware that the failure rate for hard drives is 100%...

 

I don't know how valid this is, but I was at least able to test my backup files for readability and some degree of logical consistency...

I booted up the Recovery CD, and restored all the files and folders from the apparently 'valid' backup onto some spare space - all went well.

When I tried the same thing with a 'corrupted' backup file created under XP, it failed to read the backup successfully.

So it sure looks like my issues are with Windows, rather than hardware. Sigh.

I guarantee that this will be the last Windows PC I'll ever buy - Windows is such a POS...