www.aiscl.co.uk

I've been using version 2.3.1.298 on WinXP sp2, with an 80GB Maxtor EIDE hard drive as my system drive, and having no problems of any kind. A few days ago, I installed a new hard drive, a 500GB SATA Seagate. I used Seagate Diskwizard (Acronis TrueImage) to clone my old boot partition to the new hard drive. Everything went smoothly, no problems of any kind. I then changed the boot priorities in BIOS to make the new disk the boot disk, and left all the old data on the old disk, but with changed drive letters, of course. The system all seems to work fine, with no problems of any kind, except with AISBackup.

When I run the same backup jobs I've been running, everything goes fine until it comes time to backup the opened exclusive files. At this point, the system reboots. I've tried doing a backup many times since getting the new drive; at first, when it got to the point of backing up the opened exclusive files, the system would hang, and I would have to power cycle. But after doing that a few times, it changed so that the system reboots.
After this happens, when I look at the destination folder, I find the zip files there, but no dbd or buz files. When I look at AISB, under the "sessions" tab, it shows "intermediate save - backup incomplete" with a list of the zip files. I have checked to be sure VSS is enabled. All but one of my partitions are NTFS, and the FAT32 partition is not included in the backup.
I have also:
1) removed the old drive and run just the new one. No change.
2) removed and re-installed AISB. No change.
3) created a new backup job and run it. No change.
4) removed the new drive and booted from the old one. AISB runs perfectly then, including backing up opened exclusive files.

The job I'm trying to run is backing up my boot partition, including program files, plus some data files and My Documents from another partition. I've been running the same job successfully for a long time. Sometimes I backup to another local hard drive, and sometimes to an external drive. (Two identical backup jobs with different destinations.) I get the same failure regardless of the destination.

I don't really even know what "opened exclusive" files are, but when I run a small test backup, at the end, it doesn't say "backing up opened exclusive files" and the backup job completes just fine.

Why doesn't AISB like my new drive? Does it have a problem with SATA drives?
Thanks.

I have checked Google and some other people are having the same problem with different backup software, e.g. MS Backup, Veritas, so this is not an AISBackup problem.

The PC is probably re-booting because it is set to re-boot on system error, there should be a note of the error in the event logs (Right click My Computer / Manage / Event Viewer), if not disable re-boot on error and make a note of the ‘Blue Screen’ stop error message (if you can take a digital photo of the screen). To disable re-boot on error Right Click My Computer / Properties / Advanced / Startup and recovery / on system failure uncheck Automatically reboot.

I have just found out that holding the Windows Key and press Pause is the same as Right Click My Computer / Properties.

Please also download and install version 2.4 of AISBackup, however I do not expect this to work.

http://www.aiscl.co.uk/downloadaisbackup.php

I would like you to try this, if you can:

Backup the new drive after booting from the old Windows drive, this is to ensure any new work since the transfer is backed up.

Then from the old drive format the SATA drive, and perhaps create more than one partition, this way you can keep some data separate from the boot partition which makes running a dual or multi-boot PC easier. Ensure that the SATA partition which is going hold Windows is a primary, active partition – do all this from Right Click My Computer / Manage / Disk Management.

Clone the working operating system using AISBackup’s Tools / Disk to Disk Copy option. Then use the Tools / Edit Boot Menu option to add the SATA version of Windows to the boot menu (this is probably disk 1 partition 1). The reason I ask you to do this is so that you do not have to re-configure CMOS to test the new copy of Windows. As this is a clone of Windows you may want to change the background image before re-boot so that you know which is which.

After booting the new SATA copy of Windows run the backup, and let’s hope it works this time. If it does you will have to re-install any new programs and restore any new data files backed up earlier.

If the backup still fails e-mail me as much information about the system error that is caused when Volume Copy Shadow service is been initialised. One Google result pointed to a problem with Symantec Antivirus

http://www.itnewsgroups.net/group/micro ... 10846.aspx

You could also try the trial of AISFAM, however this will not fix the problem with VSS.

http://www.aiscl.co.uk/aisfam.php

There is a problem with the installation of AISFAM, it complains that AISBackup has not been installed, at this point cancel then re-boot. AISBackup will use AISFAM instead of VSS.

Barry

Well, Barry, it looks like you got it.
I tried the easy stuff first, of course: new version of AISB, disable Norton AV, and they didn't change anything. When I disabled "re-boot on system error," the blue error screen said something about hardware improperly installed, and that seemed to mesh with your suggestion about re-cloning my boot drive, so I did. Since doing so, I've done about a half-dozen backups, and they all backed up the opened exclusive files just fine, and, as far as I can tell, everything else is good too!
I found some really weird stuff, apparently resulting from the boot disk clone I did with Acronis True Image: When I tried to re-format the boot partition on my new disk, the system refused to format; said the drive was busy, even though it wasn't doing anything at all. And, at that point, the system was also refusing to reboot; I had to power off in order to do a "re-boot!" This is the second application I've used by Acronis, and they were both just really flakey!
I really appreciate your help with this, especially since it wasn't really your problem! I've been using your program for years, I recommend it to everybody (my mother-in-law uses it!) and I've written lots of glowing reviews about it. I always mention your support, which has been outstanding for as long as I've been using the program. You really go above and beyond!
Thanks again.