Error -1102 (drive missing/unavailable)

[lunadesign]

I recently replaced a hard drive in one of my backup clients with a larger one. I used Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 to transfer the data to the new drive. Although the partition sizes grew, the data's still the same. When I go to backup the client, Retrospect fails with error -1102 (drive missing/unavailable).

 

If I change the partition serial #'s on the new drive to match the ones on the old drive, will this fix the Retrospect error? Or is Retrospect looking at partition sizes, drive geometry, etc?

 

Ideally, I'd like Retrospect to continue doing incremental backups as if it didn't know about the drive change. I don't want it to do a full backup when most of the data on the client hasn't changed.

[arnstein]

I did a similar operation on one of my PCs. I didn't replace any disks, but I repartitioned.

 

Your last questions is whether or not it is necessary to do a full backup with your new disk drive. I don't know the answer. I am going to try continuing my normal backups and see how it goes.

 

Your first question involves getting past the "drive missing/unavailable" error. I just went through this myself. All you have to do is go in to Retrospect's menus and edit your list of volumes, and edit your backup scripts.

 

Your list of volumes will show phantom disk partitions in grey font, as well as your new disk partitions in the usual black font. You can delete the partitions shown in grey font.

 

Now you can edit your backup scripts. They will have the problem that there is no source specified. So specify a source and you're done.

[rhwalker]

The underlying problem is that Retrospect tries hard to protect your data, and it knows that a repartitioned volume, even with the same name, is a different volume because the volume ID information is different. Same thing with new disk. This is because some people have multiple removable drives all with the same name ("Untitled" or "HardDisk" some such) but different contents.

 

Now, by proper choices of the settings, you can tell Retrospect not to back up duplicate files already in the backup set. This can be useful if you have many client computers running the same version of the operating system, so that the same OS files are not backed up multiple times, but it applies in this situation as well.

 

Russ

[lunadesign]

I'd love to hear how your next backup goes....please keep me posted.

 

I thought about the remove and re-add volume thing but its not clear to me if that would affect Retrospect's determination of whether or not the current partitions are equivalent to the ones on the old drive (ie, so it wont re-backup files that haven't changed).

[lunadesign]

For what its worth, I have the "Match only files in same location" option turned on. I always presumed that by "location" they meant the combination of backup client, full file system path and filename. Its not clear to me how disk/partition serial ID's and geometries/sizes come into play in this logic. Does anyone have any info on this?

[arnstein]

I'd love to hear how your next backup goes....please keep me posted.

I did a normal backup last night. No warnings or errors, but every file in the source was written to backup media. This is probably not what you want for your site. But at least, I have confidence that my source data is backed up safely!

 

[rhwalker]

I thought about the remove and re-add volume thing but its not clear to me if that would affect Retrospect's determination of whether or not the current partitions are equivalent to the ones on the old drive (ie, so it wont re-backup files that haven't changed).

As I indicated above, Retrospect tries hard to protect your data. Because the volume ID information is different, Retrospect has no concept of whether one volume (partition) is "equivalent" to another on an old drive. They aren't the same volumes, period, and there is no way you can make them be the same. That's by design of Windows (and Linux, and Unix, etc.).

 

However, as I also indicated above, you can, by appropriate choices of settings for Retrospect, tell Retrospect not back up files that are already in the backup set, regardless of the volume / machine / etc. that caused those files to be in the backup set.

 

Russ