I've been runing Ghost 15 since the very day it was released and it's been backing up my computer daily without a glitch ever since. Until about 2 weeks ago that is.
A few days ago I noticed that my backups had been failing almost every day with the following error:
Error EC8F17B7: Cannot create recovery points for job: Drive Backup of System Reserved (*:\), (C:\).
Error ED800012: The internal structure of the recovery point file (CRC Validation) is invalid, damaged or unsupported. (UMI:V-281-3215-6071)
Details:
Source: Norton Ghost
I have Ghost configured to perform a verification of my backups. I'm not sure if this CRC Validation only happens when verifications are turned on not, but I thought it worth mentioning that I have this option enabled.
I went back in my logs and noticed that the backups were failing every day for about a week with the exception of a single day where it succeeded and that one was just a small incremental backup. I tried to perform a number of manual backups and these too failed.
It finally dawned on me that about the time that the errors started I had updated my NIC driver to a new version and the backups that I was performing were backups to a network location. As a test, I first backed up to another local hard drive and that worked. Now I was starting to wonder if the new NIC driver might be the problem. Fortunately, I had kept my previous NIC driver (I always keep old drivers until I really know for sure a new one is working!). I reinstalled the previous driver and have run at least 6 backups since then - every single one has been perfectly successfull.
I'm sharing this information in the hopes that it may help others. I especially noticed that others with the same error I was seeing didn't seem to have any real resolutions. Here are the key points:
1) It might be a good idea to turn on validation, at least initially until you know your backups are reliable. After making changes to your system, it might be a good idea to turn on verification again to be sure all is still well.
2) Not all problems with Ghost are the fault of Ghost - things like drivers can very definitely be a source of problems
3) The latest driver is not always the best driver!
In my case, the driver details are as follows:
Atheros AR8121 NIC
The driver that was failing came from the Atheros version 1.0.0.49 package. This package contains drivers for DOS, Win XP, Vista, Win7, etc. The Windows 7 64-bit driver I was using from this package had a version of 1.0.0.22
.
The older driver which works fine came from the package with version 1.0.0.47 and the Win7 64-bit driver is 1.0.0.20.
- Hannes