windows System Image fails at about 150 gigs

[rm22]

i'm trying to create a system image (Win7 home ) on an external drive, but it fails after writing about 150gig of an estimated 160gigs. i have done the following...

- chkdsk /r on source and destination - both drives are fine
- using a 500gig external drive with 330gig free & a 1 TB drive with 800 gigs free - both fail at about 150gig
- defrag on destination drive - same failure
- increased external drive system protection level to 100% - same failure

i'm out of ideas... other than backing up & deleting data files before writing the image to get it well below 150gig. is there an image size limit setting or something?

thanks all

edit - actual message is "... I/O device error 8007045D

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Are you locked in and fully committed to using Windows Backup and Restore, rather than another application?

 

[rm22]

that would be my preference - it's not my pc

 

[Andyrids]

Did you run chkdsk /r from the recovery console ?

 

[mjf]

I would also try a different USB port. As alluded to above you could try the free Macrium Reflect. You can run this from the the Macrium Recovery pe CD.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html
BTW a 160 GB image for the OS partition is getting too large in my opinion because of the time to image and reimage. The owner of the PC might want to move some data off the OS partition.

 

[rm22]

Did you run chkdsk /r from the recovery console ?

no - on the pc chkdsk /r was run at startup and on the external drive it was run from an admin cmd prompt

 

[rm22]

I would also try a different USB port. As alluded to above you could try the free Macrium Reflect. You can run this from the the Macrium Recovery pe CD.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html
BTW a 160 GB image for the OS partition is getting too large in my opinion because of the time to image and reimage. The owner of the PC might want to move some data off the OS partition.

i'll try a different usb port - but i think i might have done this already inadvertently

that is what i'm eventually going to do - make a data partition - but i wanted to have an image first - like i said above i could try deleting the user data to make the image and then restore to the new partition, but this shouldn't be necessary - and might not help anyway - 160gig shouldn't be too big these days

 

[rm22]

well - the system image worked when i changed USB ports which i thought was crazy so i tried it again on the port it had just worked on and... it failed.

out of curiosity, why would changing USB ports make a difference?

still don't know what's going wrong with these images but i'm going to move on with the drive partition - just for others reference i'll post back if the errors disappear with the new partition minus the data files

 

[Andyrids]

That I/O error is telling you that there is problems reading/writing to the disk, bad clusters / blocks is the usual problem in that case (though a defective USB cable or port can also produce the same error) chkdsk /r should have taken roughly an hour to run if it was looking for and reallocating any bad blocks. Though I have known it to not find them all in the past after only one run and even then depending on the severity / quantity of bad blocks zero filling the entire drive at times has been the only solution but obviously you need the data backed up first like you are trying to do...

I would not be using windows imaging for this task... In situations like this the only imaging software I have found to work with bad drives is Drive Image XML don't let the crappy looking GUI put you off, this program will also tell you where the bad blocks are and continue reading unlike other software.

 

[mjf]

out of curiosity, why would changing USB ports make a difference?

Two possibilities:
1) The specific port USB/Hub electronics is faulty
2) The USB PC connector /cable is faulty.

I would be looking at 2). Try Changing your cable on the "bad" port. I don't think it is the imaging software based on what you have said.

 

[rm22]

i've finally completed the partitioning & file moves - there is now no problem imaging the the smaller 60gigs of just OS & apps

maybe it was a bad file on the the source drive? i've seen other posts where this was thought to be the case & i did delete a lot in the process - used 'disk cleanup' and deleted all restore points... in addition to moving all the data files

anyway good enough for now thanks all for the help

 

[Andyrids]

That is good to hear believe me I know how frustrating and time taking it can be when things won't image correctly... Since you put it down to a bad file that can constitute as being in a bad sector also so yes I thought as much, unfortunately I get to work with a lot of older and misused HDD's... bear in mind if you have the same problem again try with Drive Image XML it will copy the data it will take quite a long time but it will work so it's not really for everyday use but damn good for an emergency.

 

[rm22]

thanks will do - i've made note of it for next time. now i just need to figure out how to get MS Outlook to behave with the moved files