Disk problems after restoring an image and how I solved them.
I began experiencing problems Monday night (June 9), after using Acronis True Image 11 to restore my Windows XP Professional SP3 computer, after an experiment trying to convert my setup from single SATA to SATA RAID failed miserably. Lesson #1: If the OS is already installed and you were thinking about converting the boot system to RAID, FORGET IT!
After I finally forced my boot drive out of being labeled as a dynamic RAID disk I was able to load a saved image onto it and boot back into Windows XP (SP3), after 13+ hours of downtime. More on how I did this in my extended comments section.
Anyway, once I finally got back into Windows I left the computer alone for a while and did other things. When I came back to check for new email and see if my scheduled Windows and Acronis backup tasks were running all I saw was a hideous BSOD, with a Stop Error labeled: "BAD_POOL_HEADER," followed by these machine debug codes: STOP: 0x00000019, 0xE106F3F8, 0xE106F418, 0x0C040401. At first I thought this was a simple glitch, but I found out it wasn't, later on. My solution is further down this article.
While I was trying over and over to restore my saved image, using the Acronis Recovery CD, to one of the 250 Gb hard drives that I mucked by by initializing RAID, I noticed that my external USB drive was not listed as an accessible location for restoring a backup image, even though it was connected and turned on. I had images on both an internal and external hard drive, with the most recent being on the USB drive. So, I got out of Acronis and tried booting from my Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) live CD. My intention was to copy the newer image from the USB disk to the internal backup disk. When I got into the Linux desktop and opened "Computer" I saw both the internal and external disks, with their correct disk labels, but was unable to "mount" (open) either of them! The error message pop-up contained the following information (my interpretation, not verbatim):
This disk cannot be mounted because it is marked as being in use by Windows. This is sometimes caused by improperly removing a connected device without first ejecting it using the "Safely Remove Hardware Wizard."
This started me thinking about how the last time I used the external USB drive, when I was done saving an image to it I reached behind it and flipped the power switch off, instead of "safely stopping and removing" it. Lesson number two: always use the Safely Remove Hardware utility to stop/eject your USB devices!
So, here I was, back in Windows again, with the USB drive turned on and fully visible through My Computer. I dutifully went to the System Tray and right-clicked on the Safely Remove Hardware icon, to do it the right way, and was greeted by another cryptic pop-up error message, saying:
"An exception occurred while trying to run "Shell32.dll, Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll."
A Google search for that exception brought me to this page on the Acronis True Image Forum (reply #69), at Wilderssecurity.com. The cause of the hotplug.dll failure was an invisibly corrupted registry entry for each of the volumes labeled as a "Generic Volume." Apparently, when these disks were restored by Acronis True Image their registry entries were not "NULL Terminated," and one had the letter H appended to it's description, in Device Manager > (View Hidden Devices option selected) > Storage Volumes >> Generic Volume. To fix the problem all I had to do was right click on each generic volume and select Update Driver. After all of these disks were "updated" I rebooted and the exception in hotplug.dll was gone.
How I fixed the BSOD Stop Error BAD_POOL_HEADER
In the beginning of this article I told you about getting a BSOD whenever a scheduled Windows Backup requiring "shadow copy" was initiated (save System State). I narrowed this down to only a System State backup causing the Stop Error. The solution was similar to the hotplug issue, but, instead of "Updating" the driver for each Generic Volume, I "Uninstalled" each of them, then rebooted twice. After the second reboot they were fully re-detected and ready to use and the hotplug problem was also gone. This is probably the best way to fix these problems.
How I got my failed marked-as-RAID hard drives back to basic disks
At the top of this article I mentioned my 13 hour fight to restore a saved Acronis True Image 11 backup file to my SATA boot drive. In the beginning of this battle I learned that even though I never fully created a RAID array, nor attempted to load the OS onto it, the very fact that I attempted to create the Array "marked" the two disks as "dynamic RAID volumes." As such I was unable to restore the saved image, MBR and Bootsector to them. Furthermore, the BIOS did not see either of these disks anymore, on the SATA Controller. This was after I re-entered the BIOS and Disabled the built-in RAID Controller.
What I finally had to do was dig up my two disk, long-unused, Partition Magic 8.0 bootable floppy diskette set and boot into it's GUI. Inside the Partition Magic DOS interface I was finally able to delete the entire partitions on those two hard drives, leaving them unformatted, as unallocated disks, in the maximum amount available (no space before or after the deleted partition). This effectively removed the "dynamic" and "RAID" bootsector marking that was preventing them from being used as destination drives for the saved image file. You can also use the Secure Shredder utility in the Acronis Recovery CD, but this takes several hours. If you have any bootable DOS disks available and one has Fdisk on it, run Fdisk and delete all of the partitions on the disks that were mis-labeled as RAID disks, leaving them unformatted. Also remove the active partition, just leaving it/them as unallocated disks, with the full space available for use and no drive letters assigned. Acronis Recovery CD will see them once the BIOS sees them and will allow you to restore your image to the unallocated disk of your choice. Just be sure you select the option to restore the entire disk containing both the partitions and MBR/Bootsector.
After changing the SATA disks into unallocated space the Acronis Recovery CD had no trouble restoring my saved image to the one that became the "C" boot disk once again. It took a couple of reboots for the BIOS to recognize the restored C drive before I was able to boot into Windows from it, but all was back to normal, with the exception of the hotplug and Bad_Pool_Headers shutdown problems, solved earlier in this article. I am now using the second SATA disk (Drive letter D) for daily backups, instead of the slower IDE drive I was using before.
The only other problem that I had was a corrupted Index in the C drive's MFT, which was fixed by running Chkdsk /P on both the boot and backup disks, during startup (I used Recovery Console commands). If you have this problem with Acronis True Image 11 refusing to make a backup because of a corrupted MFT Bitmap, open My Computer, then right click on each hard disk listed, choose "Properties" > "the Tools" tab, then under Error Checking, click the button labeled "Check Now." When the options box appears check the option to "Automatically fix file system errors," then click Apply to begin. When you try this on your boot drive it will not allow you to proceed within Windows. You will be asked if you want to schedule a disk check to run on the next boot-up. Click Yes. Let Chkdsk run on the backup drive, then close all open programs, then reboot. Do not touch any keys when the Disk check screen appears, or you will cancel the check. When it has completed the computer will reboot automatically.
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