Disaster Recovery disk hangs

[wuurp]

I am trying out Retrospect 6.5 trialware that came with a Plextor 712a drive on WinXP Home. I made a full backup to DVD-RW, then created the DR disk iso. Burned this to a CD and tried booting. It starts up windows setup, and begins loading all the drivers. It gets to the point of loading the Standard IDE/ESDI drivers and then locks up, requiring me to powerdown. I scanned the DR boot CD for errors and none were found. Searching the forums found nothing. Any suggestions?

[wuurp]

I thought perhaps it was a bad burn, or something, so I burned another DR CD. Still locks up at the same point.

 

Then I noticed the version of Retrospect that came with the drive was 6.5.319 which apparently is rather old. So I downloaded the latest from here, and the driver update. Created a new iso, burned it, and it still locks up at the same point.

[natew]

Hi

 

Try running another incremental backup to your DVD backup set and create the DR ISO based on the resulting snapshot.

 

What hard disk controllers are installed in this machine? Can you give us a better overview of the hardware setup?

 

Thanks

Nate

[wuurp]

Progressive, right? Ok, did that. Created new DR iso from that snapshot. Locks up same place as before.

 

Hardware: FIC motherboard with Intel 82801DB Ultra ATA Controller (801DB ICH4 SouthBridge), Maxtor 4G100J5 harddrive, Plextor PX-712A DVD RW drive, Celeron 2.2, 512 MB ram, WinXP SP1.

 

Anything else?

[natew]

Hi

 

 

 

When the CD boots it gives you the oportunity to load third party drivers. If you load the driver for the IDE controller does the DR continue?

 

 

 

Thanks

 

Nate

[wuurp]

That seems to require a floppy drive, which I don't have on this system. Anyway, the only drivers I use are the Intel drivers in the Intel Application Accelerator.

 

So, I did a new install of WinXP but this time did not install IAA. All I added was Easy CD creator, Retrospect and the Restrospect driver update. Made a new backup set, a new DR image, burned it, and this one seems to boot. I stopped at the point where the partitions are displayed.

 

I then installed IAA. I made a backup and during this process got a few errors. Two times Retrospect crashed with "Execution terminated unexpectedly, possibly due to a power failure or system crash." but there were no power or system problems. I also got an error 205 lost access to storage medium. I had gotten these errors in my previous tests but just figured it was bugs. In my one test before installing IAA everything went smoothly.

 

Anyway, the backup did complete successfully, but the DR cd I created from this locks up the computer like before at the message trying to load standard ide/esdi drivers.

 

So, it looks like Retrospect does not play nice with IAA. The IAA drivers are supposed to significantly boost I/O performance but the backup after IAA was installed took a minute longer than without IAA. That, and the errors, and no DR means one has to go, IAA or Retrospect.

[natew]

Hi

 

This is very interesting. I have seen cases where IAA would interfere with backups to IDE CD drives but never anything like this. I'll report this issue to our engineers.

 

I uninstalled IAA a while ago as I did not see any noticable speed improvements. I'll have to take another look and see if it affects DR on my machine too.

 

Thanks

Nate

[GCPien]

I have a very similar problem. My system:

 

-WinXP Pro SP1

-Intel P4 3GHz on a Asus P4C800-E Deluxe Intel 875P chipset with ICH5R

-maxtor 120GB SATA drive on the intel ICH5R SATA controller (82801EB Ultra ATA)

-Plextor PX-708A internal IDE drive

-Retrospect 6.5 with latest driver update installed

 

Created full backup + disaster recovery CD. Burned DR to CD-RW media using Nero Ultra 6. (Disc-at-once mode, finalize CD). Able to view CD contents in Windows Explorer.

 

Booted system with DR CD, would begin loading several drivers but would ultimately freeze at the "WinXP Promise FastTrack 378 controller" ... system hangs, and does not complete the load.

 

Note that no SCSI or RAID drivers are needed, because I am able to boot and install a fresh copy of WinXP Pro from Microsoft's WinXP Pro CD, without having to press F6 and load any 3rd party drivers.

 

Not sure why this happens with the DR CD. Tried burning another copy of the ISO and still the same problem.

 

Any suggestions?

GCP

[natew]

Hi

 

Do you have the same problem if you press F6 at boot and load the promise driver manually?

 

Thanks

Nate

[GCPien]

The odd thing is, I don't even need the driver. My motherboard does have a Promise FastTrack 378 controller, but it is disabled in BIOS. When my WinXP Pro OS is installed, this controller does not even show up on the System Devices window.

 

 

 

On the off chance the DR CD was trying to load the driver because it was expecting to find the controller, I enabled the controller in BIOS during Disaster Recovery. The DR CD still freezes at the same point: when trying to load the promise driver.

 

 

 

I have not tried pressing F6 and manually loading the driver for this reason. Do you still think it's worth trying?

 

 

 

GCP

[natew]

Hi

 

I would give it a shot. You may even want to try re-enabling the promise controller in BIOS.

 

Retrospect references your registry and drivers when in creates the DR CD. If you have ever had the Promise controller enabled those drivers may still exist on the system. As a result Retrospect is trying to load them during DR.

 

Thanks

Nate