Solved Create system image utility - some general questions

[pokeefe0001]

I normally use Acronis True Image for backup and recovery. Fine for file and folder recovery, but I want a reliable full system image of the Windows 7 PCs before upgrading to Window 10. I've just discovered that the Acronis bootable recovery system could not read always my backups so I'm trying the Windows Backup and Restore utility.

For some reason I get an I/O error when backing up to a Western Data 3 TB USB 3 external drive. (Interestingly Acronis writes to the disk with no problem, and, after a few false starts, the recovery system has no problem reading it.) Before I research this more, is there any reason the Windows Backup and Restore utility would have trouble creating a system image backup on a 3 TB USB 3 external drive?

The backup seems to be working fine to an old Seagate 2 TB USB 2 external drive. Is there any way to verify the backup once it is created? The Acronis recovery system had trouble reading backup fines on this disk even though Windows (and Acronis TI 2015 running on Windows) had no trouble reading and writing. I want to make sure the Microsoft recovery system does not have the same problem. But I don't want to do an actual recovery just to validate the backup.

And finally, Process Explorer shows no disk I/O even though the backup seems to be progressing (slowly). Is this I/O somehow hidden. My Kaspersky security software does show I/O activity.

 

[pokeefe0001]

Ok. I found the cause for the error when trying to create the system image backup on my WD 3 TB drive. Searching for error code 2155348010 I found several hits. Many large external drives - not just WD - now use a sector size of 4096 bytes rather than the 512 bytes expected by the image copy creation utility.

One such explanation is at
https://social.technet.microsoft.co...ee4e2/backup-fails-with-error-code-2155348010

WD has a utility to reformat its drives and turn on support to emulate 512 byte sectors, but that lowers performance. And I would have to backup and restore my backup disk because the reformatting obviously clears the drive. Not worth it since I've now created the system image on another drive (temporarily borrowed from another PC).

I've read the Win8 supports the 4096 byte sector size. Hopefully Win10 does, too.