Repairing Damaged Media

[donnie7]

Is there any way to REPAIR a piece of damaged CDR media? In restoring a 40 Gig HD, CDR #35 of 98 members is damaged. It hangs up at the same place each time. The original HD was wiped clean. Original files were lost in the crash. Retrospect was the only way we were going to restore it. Anything we can do? Looks like the CDR has a pinhole. You can see clear through to the other side.

 

Tried to restore 50+ Gigs of data from a crashed HD using Retrospect 4.3. And was quite disappointed that the appllication did not restore or perform well with LARGE amounts of data. It listed wrong amounts of data to be restored, over 250 gigs! And as well, did not recover all files even though they were listed in the search and retrieval window! I was shocked. Being a Retrospect user from version 1.3, it never failed me on smaller recoveries. But on large amounts of data over 10 gigs, forget it. Does not work well at all.

 

Will version 5.1 perform any better with large HD recoveries? Did not know that 4.3 had so many bugs and poor performance until it was too late. Anyone who can help, your input is most appreciated. Just disappointed that Retropect was not able to perform adequately in time of need.

 

Using a Macintosh Blue and White G3/400, 512 ram, 60 and 120 Gig Maxtor Diamond Max Plus HD's, OS 9.2.2.

 

Thank you all!

 

Donnie Dixon

[hmseiden]

I remember (when I was on Retro 4.3) restoring an entire disk from DDS2 tape without much trouble. Perhaps you should recheck your restore procedure vis-a-vis the wipe clean and restore process you use. There have been CD issues with 4.3 though both writing and reading related to drive acceptance and proper operation. You might consult the Retrospect Knowledge Base. My current set up is different than yours so results may vary.

 

 

 

As to the bad CD in your current restoration, Retro allows you to skip a disc during the restore if one is bad. Have you tried that? Did you use Verify on the CD Backup? If yes, why would a pinhole on the CD not be flagged?

 

 

 

As to the restore, you haven't said where in the process you encountered an error or if there is some other problem so let's start from scratch. The procedure I use for restoration of a hard drive is:

 

1. Use the formatter for your HD target (usually Apple Drive Utility) to format, partition, and prepare the HD (boot from another disk, usually CD).

 

2. Install a system OS9 onto the target disk.

 

3. Make sure the target works.

 

4. Try full restore (Restore Entire Disk) option in Retro 4.x first.

 

5. If a disk proves to be unreadable (as per your comment) skip it.

 

6. When the backup completes see if all your files are there. You may have lost the items on the bad CD permanently. If specific files exist in the Retro list that weren't restored, then see if Retro can restore those files individually, but after the the full restore completes.

 

7. Alternatively you can verify a CD. However the specific contents of a member (one CD) of the backup set may not be available to you. That may be a question for Retro folks. I am a simple user only.

 

 

 

My current setup:

 

CPU- G3 Yosemite (400MHz, B&W, 702MB RAM)

 

Drives- ATA (80GB), SCSI (18GB), Tape (AIT-2)

 

Retro 5.0.238

 

Clients- WIN, PC (3)

 

Backup Schedule- Local daily, weekly; Clients weekly

 

 

 

Regards,

 

Henry