My First IFW Restore is Failing

[KevinM]

I am new to IFW. I have taken several backups without any issue on my laptop. Recently, I had an opportunity to restore one of those backups to the same laptop. That restore failed. I booted my laptop using my TBWinRE USB thumb drive. The backup file was stored on an external HDD. My laptop has an SSD. When I attempt to restore the backup, I receive the following error message:

"A hard drive error occurred when writing 48 sectors to LBA 2742272. Do not abort if you want to ignore these errors. Do you want to abort the operation?" I answered "Yes" to that question.

When this occurred, I sent an email to tech support. Below is the response I received:

"Delete all the partitions first, reboot in to TBWinRE (reboot if did it from there just to be sure windows not keeping one in use - if you use ifw to delete them then should be good too), then tick the box to restore all the partitions and the restore first track option, it will be treated as a full drive restore to a point. If it doesn't boot, you just have to ensure the correct partition is active. If you get a write error during that, it may be you have some sectors going bad (the one you got is probably because windows was in use and since deleted IFW didn't see anything to lock)."

I don't want to "brick" my laptop. I am still willing to risk my laptop. I can always reinstall Windows if I have to (although I have never done that either). I work on web server application config and support at work - but I am not a hardware guy. When I attempted my restore, I only attempted to restore the main C:\ drive partition. I didn't try to restore all partitions. Since tech support is telling me to delete all partitions first, that means I will need to restore all partitions. I don't know what it means to make sure the correct partition is active or how to change it if required.

I guess my question at this point is how do you delete all of the partitions using IFW? I have never deleted partitions before either.

FYI, I am including the screen where I select the target where the backup should be restored. Maybe I am doing something wrong that someone can correct me on.

Thank you.

[Brian K]

Kevin,

Do you have an "Entire drive" backup or just a C: drive backup?

Was your backup done with VSS or PHYLock?

Did you see this?

https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=616

[TeraByte Support]

For the latest Win10 versions you should be using 3.30. The message is
either because you have actual hardware errors or windows is preventing
overwriting. 3.30 does some extra things to kick windows off the
partitions. You can also use ah IFL restore disk.

Also for Windows versions, enable the option "delete restore destination"


"KevinM" wrote in message news:17157@public.image...

I am new to IFW. I have taken several backups without any issue on my
laptop. Recently, I had an opportunity to restore one of those backups to
the same laptop. That restore failed. I booted my laptop using my TBWinRE
USB thumb drive. The backup file was stored on an external HDD. My laptop
has an SSD. When I attempt to restore the backup, I receive the following
error message:

"A hard drive error occurred when writing 48 sectors to LBA 2742272. Do not
abort if you want to ignore these errors. Do you want to abort the
operation?" I answered "Yes" to that question.

When this occurred, I sent an email to tech support. Below is the response
I received:

"Delete all the partitions first, reboot in to TBWinRE (reboot if did it
from there just to be sure windows not keeping one in use - if you use ifw
to delete them then should be good too), then tick the box to restore all
the partitions and the restore first track option, it will be treated as a
full drive restore to a point. If it doesn't boot, you just have to ensure
the correct partition is active. If you get a write error during that, it
may be you have some sectors going bad (the one you got is probably because
windows was in use and since deleted IFW didn't see anything to lock)."

I don't want to "brick" my laptop. I am still willing to risk my laptop. I
can always reinstall Windows if I have to (although I have never done that
either). I work on web server application config and support at work - but
I am not a hardware guy. When I attempted my restore, I only attempted to
restore the main C:\ drive partition. I didn't try to restore all
partitions. Since tech support is telling me to delete all partitions
first, that means I will need to restore all partitions. I don't know what
it means to make sure the correct partition is active or how to change it if
required.

I guess my question at this point is how do you delete all of the partitions
using IFW? I have never deleted partitions before either.

FYI, I am including the screen where I select the target where the backup
should be restored. Maybe I am doing something wrong that someone can
correct me on.

Thank you.

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

When restoring a BitLocker partition you will usually want to restore it by itself (a single partition restore) and the destination partition would need to be unlocked first (this assumes you created a normal backup using VSS in Windows). If not unlocked, some sectors will usually be inaccessible due to BitLocker. In that case, you can delete the partition first. Using the "Delete Restore Destination" option in IFW's settings is an easy way to do that. Note that if the partition is deleted prior to the restore (or as part of the restore) or if you restore over a locked partition that the partition will no longer be encrypted. Enable BitLocker on the partition once back in Windows.

[KevinM]

Thank you for all of the replies. This helps.

Brian K: I backed up all of the partitions - not just the C:\ drive. I am 90% sure I used PHYLock during the backup. I just don't remember. Does it matter? I did see the BitLocker reference you provided. But I don't think I need it in this case. See below.

TeraByte Support: BitLocker was used to encrypt the C:\ drive after the backup image was taken. One of the objectives of my restore is to hopefully remove the BitLocker encryption. But, maybe I still need to unlock that partition before restoring. I didn't try that. I could also create an IFL restore USB flash drive. If that would eliminate some "windows" issues, I am good with that too.

The laptop I am working with is good for this test. The only thing on it that I care about is the Windows 10 Professional operating system. I really want to learn how to use IFW/IFL properly since it looks like a great tool. I think I will use the following process:

1) Create a Windows 10 recovery USB flash drive (just in case I totally screw up this restore).
2) Create an IFL USB flash drive.
3) Boot into the IFL USB flash drive, unlock BitLocker (if you can do that with IFL), and attempt to restore the C:\ drive partition only.

If the above attempt fails, then I will install IFW 3.30 and try the above test again - first using IFW and if that fails, using IFL.

Does that make sense?

If I trusted myself and IFW/IFL, I would simply use whole drive backup and restores. But until I am confident with the restores, I don't want to lose the Windows recovery partition since I can get my laptop back from there if required. On the other hand, if I totally screw this up, I can install Ubuntu on my laptop.

[Brian K]

Kevin, you created the image of a non BitLocker partition so using PHYLock is OK. If you don't really need BitLocker, turn it OFF in Windows (not IFL). Backup/Restore is much easier without BitLocker being present.

Use Entire Drive Backup/Restore. It's much easier than individual partition Backup/Restore although both methods work. The latter method requires more experience to select the correct Restore options.

For your current test of restoring the C: drive, (use IFL or TBWinRE) select the OS partition (it probably won't have the C: drive letter) as per your screenshot and press Delete on the keyboard. Restore into the Free space you just created. IFW won't fail on you.

[KevinM]

It worked!!!

I created an IFL USB flash drive. I was then able to restore my C:\ drive partition with no problems. IFL did not give me any write errors. I didn't even try to unlock BitLocker first. I simply restored the partition.

Now that I saw that IFL works, I then restored the entire drive. That also worked. And it was fast too. The restore using IFL was faster than the original IFW backup.

Thank you to the people who replied to this thread. The manual describes all of the features - but I was having difficulty identifying what features applied to my situation. IFL seems to be the answer to my issues. I think of images as reading/writing 0's and 1's to a file. To me, it shouldn't matter if the drive is BitLocker encrypted or not. I just want the 0's and 1's backed up and restored "as is". The concept of PHYLock vs VSS doesn't seem to apply to IFL - which I like since that concept confused me too.

Going forward, I think I will use IFL for backups and restores. I am just going to make entire drive backups and, when required, entire drive restores. To date, I have performed backups manually - and I will continue to do that. It seems to make sense to me to boot from a USB flash drive for both backups and restores to ensure the laptop internal drive is not in use. I am amazed that IFW works for backups even when I boot into the Windows laptop being backed up. If I get to the point where I want to schedule full and/or differential backups, then I will revisit running IFW from the laptop.

Once again, thank you for your help. I don't think I would have figured this out without you.

[Bob Coleman]

KevinM wrote:


> It seems to make sense to me to boot from a USB flash drive
> for both backups and restores to ensure the laptop internal drive is not in
> use.

I felt the same way for a long time, but eventually got up the courage to use IFW and really haven't looked back, but I've never used Bitlocker.