Trouble with drive Image

[Felecha]

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This is NOT General Hardware related.
AnandTech Moderator
Edited: 06/02/2002 at 8:45 PM by AnandTech Moderator

Moderator -- is this the right forum? I didn't know where to put it, and one of the threads I had searched through just before posting was from General Hardware, so I thought that was the appropriate one.

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Just worked all weekend on getting W2K Pro installed on both my laptop and my desktop
Laptop = HP Pavilion n5470 1GHz Athlon, 20GB HD
Desktop = custombuilt 900Athlon, two 30GB IBM Deskstars
My hope is to get both fully loaded with all the apps I use, then Ghost or DriveImage them before I do anything else, in case I need to restore a clean install sometime. Both installs are now about 3.5GB.
I tried a few experiments with DriveImage 4.0, which I bought a year ago and put aside when I couldn't get it to make CD images that could be depended on. The earlier experiments on Friday, just the OS without any apps, indicated that I could make an image and store it on another partition and ding the OS partition and restore it nicely from the image. But no that I'm ready for the Big Time, all 3.5GB of 0's and 1's, I'm having problems. Once on the laptop the imaging just froze at 85%, and I had to bail out. On the desktop I'm on my third try -- twice it has come to 61% and put up a message -- "DesktopImage.002 already exists - do you want to replace it? If you do, all data in it will be destroyed!" I believe I'm correct that a single .pqi file stops at 2megabytes and the image continues with a .002 file? Well, both times I clicked yes, and it went ahead and immediately stopped, saying there was a file error in the image and it bailed out to the starting line.
By the way, on the 2 desktop failures, I chose "No compression", thinking that would eliminate at least one possible source of error. My third try, currently in progress as I type on the laptop here, is using High Compression.
So I'm not feeling confident here.
Another peculiarity is that I generally get an objection that the image will require 3500MB of space, and only ____ is available (not always the same amount reported, but for gosh sakes, there's way more than that in there, like 20GB of free space!)
I also have Norton SystemWorks 2001 Pro, which has Ghost. But that doesn't seem to work with NTFS, from what I understand. I did look at it one time, and couldn't figure it out. It apparently couldn't even see the NTFS partition -- it didn't show in the drop-down list box.
So, any help? I have tons of hard drive space to store images, and can partition things all over the place with PQMagic to create safe storage partitions if I want, but if the software isn't right, or I'm not doing it right, what can I do?

 

[Nefrodite]

3.5gb of appz? how did you do that?i have office xp+ all general appz installed and its still only 1.5gb on the hd. w2k pro. don't install games and sh*t on your system partition.


as for the image. why not use partition magic and convert it to fat32? ntsf is a pain in the a$$ for imaging. my images with high compression in ghost easily fit on a cd with much room to spare.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Are you runnig Drive Image from Windows or by booting to DOS (diskette if C: is NTFS)?

I wouldn't expect imaging C: to work well from within the OS since the partition would likely keep changing form swap or tempfile writes. I've always done C: images from a DOS boot (writing image to another partition) and have never had a problem with Win2K Pro or Server. I always use high compression.

Have you done disk checks to make sure the filesystem is OK?

 

[RalfHutter]

NTFS is definitely not a pain in the ass. It is so far ahead of FAT32 it's not even funny. Drive Image and NTFS get along fine.

Use full compression, you will have a much smaller finished image.

Felecha - I PMed you, look for it and we can talk. We'll get it straightened out.

 

[Felecha]

DaveSimmons - when I click on the DriveImage button, it shuts down to a DOS environment.

Nefrodite -- I don't have a lot of useless stuff.

WINNT = 1.05 GB
MS Office = 117 MB
Norton SystemWorks = 100 MB
MS Visual Studio = 1 GB
PowerQuest - 50 MB
JBuilder = 115 MB
JDK 1.3 = 50 MB
MySQL = 40 MB
on and on, it adds up ...

RalfHutter -- I realized the drive I was imaging to was my 2nd HD on the desktop, which is still FAT32, and DI was installed into W2K, so maybe it can't write an image out to FAT32. So I carved out a 5GB NTFS partition there and it's .... 3, 2, 1 ... just successfully written the image, it says. I was waiting for the result. I did get your PM

 

[Felecha]

next morning --

Got a completed image to happen on the desktop, and verified it in Drive Image Editor. In fact, one compressed, one not, both verified.

But now, thinnking to test it, to prove I can use it if needed, I created a 5GB Primary NTFS partition on the first hard drive, and went into Drive Image to restore the .pqi to that partition, and it objects that there is not enough space in that partition. I don't know what to do with that.

The image itself is just over 2GB. The drive it was imaged from was just 3.5GB. How could 5GB not be big enough?

Several times I have seen things in DriveImage that indicate that it is not reading drive sizes the same way I am. When creating images, I've seen similar warnings - "not enough space to hold the image...do you want to continue?" Since I was sure the designated target space was ample, I've just gone ahead, and it worked out ok.

But here I can't get it to even try. It's not a warning, it's an error message and the game is over.

Another puzzler -- when creating an image, in the text field at top left where I name the image file, I've been just naming it -- "DesktopImage". I'm used to file extensions being automatically added. And in the next window it shows "DesktopImage.PQI" as the filename about to be created. But I've seen later that when I go in to restore it, the file isn't listed in the left pane unless I click "All files" to be shown. And even at that, the file appears as "DesktopImage." -- no extension, just the dot. And if I select it, an error message says "Not a valid image file".

Back in Windows Explorer, it shows as "DesktopImage.PQI", upper case PQI. I've created others and explicitly named them "DesktopImage.pqi", lower case, at the time of creation. Those show in Windows Explorer as *.pqi, lower case, and are displayed in Drive Image at DOS when I want to select them for restore.

So maybe that's a small thing and I just have to explicitly give it the .pqi.

But still, I can't get it to even try a restore, saying the partition is too small.

 

[randypj]

Felecha--

You might want to PM corky-g, if he doesn't show up in this thread, if someone else can't get you fixed up.

I don't use NTFS and haven't had to restore an image in years, but.....

1. I'm thinking for the restore, you have to have "free space", that is a non-formatted partition?
2. Creating images has become so automatic for me, that I can't visualize very well, but, I think you are correct, that all you should have to do is give DI a name for your backup, and it automatically numbers them.
3. I create my image files in 650mb sizes, so I can burn them to cd, but, usually just copy them to another pc on my LAN. Seems I just never get around to burning them to cd anymore.
4. I still name them using the DOS 8.3 format. I don't know if this helps, but it can't hurt.
5. I've used DI from both boot floppies and from within W9x. Sometimes, it seemed that the memory management was better within W9x, rather than from boot floppies.
--Randy

 

[Felecha]

Continuing to fiddle around. I increased the test partition to 12GB and tried the restore, with the .pqi, not .PQI image. It worked. When I booted to it, it was all there. Strange that it should need a way, WAY oversized partition to restore to.

Still, it's not crucial now. I'm confident I've seen it restore, and as long as I can verify in the Editor, and the real-time restores are going to be in the same partition of a failed system, I should not worry any more.

Thanks to all

F

 

[Nefrodite]

yea i've had that problem. not quite that bad. had to increase partition size from 4gb to 4.5gb b4 an image made of a 4gb would fit

 

[Mavrick007]

I would expect that the partition needs to be large enough to accomodate the size of the image as well as what it would uncompress to.
If that's the case, then you might have been able to do it on a 6gig drive (3.5 + 2gigs = 5.5gigs). Not sure if this is the way that it works in essence though.

 

[tazdevl]

Originally posted by: Nefrodite
3.5gb of appz? how did you do that?i have office xp+ all general appz installed and its still only 1.5gb on the hd. w2k pro. don't install games and sh*t on your system partition. as for the image. why not use partition magic and convert it to fat32? ntsf is a pain in the a$$ for imaging. my images with high compression in ghost easily fit on a cd with much room to spare.

NTFS isn't a pain to image if you use a program like DI that is compatible with it. Ghost's support is almost laughable considering the poplularity and prevelance of NTFS.