C90S Ghost8 Corrupts the SSD drive!

I've had my C90S for a few weeks and been through the heat and memory issues. To even get XP to install, I've had to revert to BIOS 801 (from 902) and upgrade to super fast memory.

With that finally behind me, and XP running well, I'm trying to take partition images with UBCDWin (Ultimate boot CD 3.10, based on Bart PE) and Ghost 8. But about every second time I try... the partition I'm trying to image is corrupted!

I can explore the drive before I try the image and all is well, then I attempt the image, it fails with a message like "cannot read root directory...", and then windows explorer says the drive is improperly formatted. The machine then won't boot.

Is anyone else having problems like this?

What are you all imaging your C90S drive partitions with?

----
C90S
E6700
MTRON 32 GB SSD hard disk (Just... sick... fast)
8600M GT 512MB
1GB x 2 PC2-6400 Geil (Gold heatsinks)
XP Pro

 

I use oo's diskimage, and while I have not images my main drive yet, it worked well on my secondary partion

 

I image with Acronis True Image, never had a single problem with it.

 

Acronis True Image is very good i have tried it too.. Tell me, how long does it take with that SSD to boot up into windows XP with C90s ?

 

holy crap... SSD... i want one... to bad i need like two of those

 

I don't think the software is affecting the drive, but rather, the software is not capable of properly reading it for some reason. Its not corrupted.

Which Mtron do you have, the Mobi or Pro? Im running the pro presently.

 

Thanks for getting back to me everyone!

ziggo0 & freelance: You are using Acronis installed directly on the C90s? Not on some other boot CD or flash drive, right?

freelance: next time I have it loaded and working, I'll time the XP boot. It is fast! MS Word, Outlook, Visual Studio all open before you can click something else.

TXcharger07: off to www.neostore.com with you.

flamenko: my SSD is the mobi. And no, the partition is really gone after I attempt the backup! Before I try the backup, all files are visible, usable and fine. Afterwards, all the tools I point at the partition indicate that it is corrupt. The machine can't boot. Are you aware of any SSD-related problems with backup software?

Is anyone else using BartPE or UBCDWin on the C90S?

I'm thinking the funny chipset setup (desktop CPU and notebook guts) is causing my problem.

 

No sorry... I don't know of any software compatability issues until now.

 

I use Acronis to image my C partition, which is rougly 18gb. I backup the image across network to my server, and restore using the boot cd. IT works perfectly. If i wanted, I can put the image on my other partition (F) and it would work the same.

 

ThunderBatch i will be waiting for that benchmark

Acronis installs into windows, and it is possible to do a backup of the entire system, structures of the partitions, boot records etc, inside windows, even if you are listening to music or working in MS_Word. Restoring the image, thats another story its necessary to boot and restore from the loader Acronis starter.

As far as backing up an SSD drive, it could be that once those drives are relatively new, the disk controller might be slightly different then the one for an HDD. As far as the windows goes, maybe that abstraction layer is indifferent. but for programs like Ghost and even Acronis, maybe there should be a new version that supports SSD drives because of the way they may handle the MBR - Master boot record information from an SSD drive. I haven't searched on that yet but it may be different, and if that's the case, then you will have to look for a backup software that allows SSD support

cheers and i'll wait for that benchmark

 

I will get you that number as soon as I rebuild again

The guys over at the UBCE4Win forum are familiar with 'marginal' machines that can run XP but can't run XP pre-install.

Your supposition about the MBR is insightful. I'll keep my eyes open for information on that front.

Until then: I bought Acronis 11 today and will use it installed on the box. I won't use UBCD4Win again on this machine.

Thanks for your help.

 

freelance...

I've installed Acronis 11 on the C90S and successfully created and recovered from an image. I prefer to do my backups from a 'live' CD but this is certainly a fine alternative. The Acronis 'recovery media', whatever OS it is running, does not tax my computer at all like the BartPE / UBCD4Win environment. It seems a fine product, well worth the $50 to me at this point.

I got out my stopwatch to time the XP boot accurately and timed it 10 times; crazy old scientific training reemerging there. The times are the same from either the 'On' button-press on a cold start or from the black screen before POST messages on a restart. To start of POST messages - 7 seconds, end of POST - 13, logon screen - 31. Two 2 cases went 32 seconds.

I would suppose that the 7 and 13 seconds are typical of all C90Ss, is this true? I would hope the 31 is very atypical, or else I wasted a bunch of cash. What are typical times to the logon screen?

Now that the machine is running well again, I'm reminded of what is really different about this drive. Things you would normally avoid like zipping the contents of drive C: and writing the zip on drive D:, when both C: and D: are the same physical disk (You know the 'grinding' of the head re-positioning). Or running a virus scan while defragging. Things that used to be fouled up by drive head position are fine to do since the SSD has no sense of 'position' at all. Really, really, cool.

Thanks again for your help.

 

Acronis true image is a very good piece of software, you did good in my op.

Well, as far as the post delay, i got those results during post as well, but it takes me, right after the MBR of my HDD is accessed, it takes 59 seconds to enter xp, with the start button operacional. In your case it takes, 31-13 = 18 seconds, not bad, altough i didn't benchmark it with a fresh install, i see that with an SSD it's at least, 3 times faster then a 2,5" 5400rpm HDD

One last test you could try is to hibernate, how many RAM GB do you have? that's a heavy operation but i always like to hibernate my notebook, and with my configuration it takes a lot of time to write 3GB.

 

I have 2GB of ram.

It takes about 15 seconds to hibernate to a cold, dark state. It takes about 12 seconds, after the POST, to return.

 

The hibernation time will depend on the number of open applications, because the more apps are open, the more RAM is used and will need to be written on the HDD.

 

I just benchmark the hibernation time and it takes approximately43 seconds to full hibernate, with a 5400rpm, starting when i press the hibernate button. But I have 3GB of RAM, im almost sure that if i had 2 GB it would be approximately 1/3 faster.

@E.B.E. I think RAM is not allocated continuosly..so how does the computer know what RAM sector's are occupied and what sector's are not if he doesn't peform a full ram scan? If he finds nothing, he has to write nothing (0) to the hard drive..but writes it probably, then, i would say it might save some information on the HDD as to what sectors are of interest or not, making the restore a lot faster, OR saving the hibernation file with contiguos information, one of the two, that's why restoring from hibernation is considerably faster i guess, and that's why the hibernation file, hiberfil.sys, always ocuppies an amount equal to the size of the RAM we have, so i think that's it's not that linear, to say the more RAM is used the more will be needed to write on the HDD. Anyway, i think this topic is concluded

ThunderBatch, thanks for your benchmarks!

 

Personally I use Paragon Partition Manager for any disk image backups, it's compatible with Vista and XP and it's capable of perfectly cloning disks from any disk type, including dynamic disks which Acronis and others fail miserably.

Ghost has been abandoned since PowerQuest was bought out by Symantec, and they haven't changed fixed any of the compatibility and image cloning issues for recent OSes.

 

Thanks for your input D3X, I'll look at Paragon.