Full Version: Do Not Trust Disk Image
From: Harvey only (HARVEY-ONLY) [#1]
20 Jul 2006
To: ALL
Yes, got bit by putting my trust in that program. Lost almost everything.
I'll try to keep the 8-12 hour saga short.
I had an image created by Disk Image on my USB drive, and a few updates of my document directory.
I had a WinXP crash that when it came back up said that one of the sub directories in Settings was unreadable. Instantly tried to create a new disk image but the drive went completely after two hours of starting to create the backup. OK I had one only a few months old.
I thought that the Disk Image program was good if you had a bad virus or a hard drive crash. WRONG on the hard drive. It was a FAT32 disk and will not go on to a NTFS format. Found that out after finding out that it will not restore the primary drive with the operating system running. The boot disk is a joke, it contains a few files but no DOS to start things up. Even with booting with DOS 6.22, there was no executable file on it. A bad joke.
I had to get two new drives, one for the operating system and a secondary one to write the image onto, then switch them out. WRONG. WinXP will only format with NTFS, and when going through the pseudo-dos spent 20 minutes formatting it then reported that the disk was too big for FAT32. Same size, 40 Gig. Got brilliant and made it the primary drive and installed WinME, which formatted it as FAT32 without a hiccup, or so I thought. Maybe the cluster size was different than the original drive but...
After 4 hours of restoring the image, it is useless. Most directories are totally screwed up, just garbage throughout the directories.
So I am starting from scratch without my daughter's wedding pictures, laser settings or almost all of my product layout files. I do have some old backup CD's and my updated document files from a more recent file backup to the USB drive. Thank goodness for that.
Just remember that if you have a hard drive crash, unless you already have an identical drive, formatted exactly as the first, DISK IMAGE is worse than useless, it gives a false feeling of security.
I must say that writing this makes me feel a little better, it warns others.
From: Cody (BOBTNAILER) [#2]
21 Jul 2006
To: Harvey only (HARVEY-ONLY) [#1] 21 Jul 2006
Harvey,
Thank you very much for sharing that.
I've used a Maxtor OneTouch II for the last year to do backup images on all my machines. After reading about your problem, I think I'll go back to just copying all my data files onto the backup drive (rather than a complete disk image).
Sorry this happened to you, my friend...must be incredibly frustrating.
Cody
From: Carl (CSEWELL) [#3]
21 Jul 2006
To: Harvey only (HARVEY-ONLY) [#1] 21 Jul 2006
From: Harvey only (HARVEY-ONLY) [#4]
21 Jul 2006
To: Carl (CSEWELL) [#3] 21 Jul 2006
It is a dell 8100 and an IBM Deskstar 40 Gig drive.
It was replaced with a 40 Gig drive for compatability.
From: Dave Jones (DAVERJ) [#5]
21 Jul 2006
To: Harvey only (HARVEY-ONLY) [#4] 21 Jul 2006
I could be wrong, but I believe XP will only format a FAT32 drive up to 32GB during installation, but after installation it is capable of formatting one larger. I know it has no problem reading and writing to a larger one. I can format a USB 250GB FAT32 drive on my iMac and XP can use it OK.
I back up important documents directly to USB drives by simply copying folders. For full system backups I have been using Retrospect SBS server, but haven't had a major failure since I started using it, so don't know if it's really the best. I have multiple USB drives (rotating between home and office) with the documents backed up, so even if I have to reinstall the system and applications, I have the data files safely saved away. Most of my important documents are kept on a file server, which makes it easy to back them all up at once.
From: Harvey only (HARVEY-ONLY) [#6]
21 Jul 2006
To: Dave Jones (DAVERJ) [#5] 21 Jul 2006
Would not format FAT32 on installation. Went in later to the command prompt and set it to FAT32 and it spent 20 minutes formatting then said the disk was too large for FAT32. Instructed it to make 32K clusters and same result. The only thing that would do it was WinME and I allowed that to default with no success. The original was formatted by Dell and came with WinME so I thought that would be a good bet.
It was my stupidity that relied on Disk Image and not doing backups on CD's since Jan 2004. So I was able to get some old info from there.
I also have a documents directory that I created for all, (yeah sure), documents that I saved in normal file format. Thank goodness, I got some irreplaceable info out of that like my layouts for Corel for all of the product that I make. But the laser settings were in a different folder and I only have backups from 1/2004, but that is something. Lost the laser driver though.
From: Dave Jones (DAVERJ) [#7]
21 Jul 2006
To: Harvey only (HARVEY-ONLY) [#6] 22 Jul 2006