I am stumped. Ghost 15, starting a drive backup with the "New Recovery Point" option selected.
Backup process starts. It writes a small file 10 Mb (approx) for Windows 7's "System Reserved" drive. It then creates a file of around 86Gb for the backup image for my C-Drive.
The backup starts. Several hours (3-4), the backup fails. All I have is the record int he log which says:
Error EC8F17B7: Cannot create recovery points for job: Drive Backup of System Reserved (*:\), (C:\). Error E7D1001F: Unable to write to file. Error EBAB03F1: The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation. Error E7D1001F: Unable to write to file. Details: Source: Norton Ghost
The drive being written to is formatted to NTFS and has heaps of free space for the backup.
I ran a full chkdsk (/f /v /r) on the USB drive and there were NO ERRORS.
I ran the same backup with only one change. To break the backup up into 4Gb segments and this backup ran to completion on the same target drive with no errors. (Sure I could change the defaults to run with the segmented backup size but I shouldn't have to.)
I thought there were no limits to a filesize under NTFS, at least that it could write a file up to 2Tb in size if that drive had that much space,
Is this another bug in Norton Ghost? I made sure that the machine doesn't sleep/hibernate/do anything else while the backup is running and I've disabled the network adapter to make sure that it isn't accessing anything off the machine.
Solutions? Hey Norton/Symantec: When is Ghost 15.1 coming with all the fixes it desperately seems to need!!!
Welcome to the forum. There should not be a size limitation with NTFS apart from what you mentioned.
Is the 86GB you mentioned the actual size of your backup image when you got the error from Ghost and the backup aborted, or the perceived size it should be if the backup ran to completion?
I have 3 internal 500GB SATA drives but no single drive on my system has quite this much data. But since I have space to play with I'll try a test to see if I can reproduce this on my system. I will add a bunch of large video files or something to get my utilized space above this threshold and then do an independant backup and see if I get the same problem.
So please confirm the exact size of the image backup on your backup drive when Ghost bombed out.
I start the backup and this 86GB is the size of the file that Ghost creates in the backup directory to hold the drive image. It is what Ghost has calculated. The "used" space on my drive is 191Gb (of 465Gb) so I have to assume that the 86Gb is the size that Ghost has calculated, factoring in compression.
Unfortunately, it takes 3-5 hours before the failure occurs and, by the time I get to see the backup directory, Ghost has already deleted the backup file as part of its failure/recovery steps.
I' ve been able to successfully perform the backup by activating the "split" option (4GB and 250Mb options tested successfully).
The USB attached drive (WD My Book 1TB) as well as the source hard drive both seem to be fine based on every utility and scan that I can run on the drives. (I've scanned for bad sectors and no errors are returned.)
Unfortunately, it looks like another glitch in Ghost 15.0.
Hey Symantec reps: Is there any indication on when some fixes for Ghost 15 will be made available for installation? I'm concerned that my 60 day return period will expire before any resolutions to the several problems are made available.
What can we do to extend our return period in case the problems aren't really fixed after it runs out?
Thanks for the update. I understand you are concerned about the 60 day return period expiring but if there really is a generic problem with creating files of this size then I am personally confident Symantec will fix the problem. At this point we have not ascertained that the problem you are having is a Ghost issue. There are any number of possibilities as to why you are having this problem.
You have run diagnostics on the drive and have not seen a problem but this alone does not mean it must be a Ghost issue.
There are a couple of things we can do to help determine this.
1) I am happy to see if I can reproduce the problem on my system. Since I don't have this much data on any single drive it might take me a few days to be able to test this since I need to increase the data storage to an appropriate level. However I will do this and if I have the same problem we've taken a step toward finding out if this is a Ghost issue or not.
2) You can try doing this backup to another drive of appropriate capacity to determine if this issue specific to this one drive. FYI: this may seem counter intuitive but you could also do a backup right back to your source drive. Obviously you would never want to do this for a real backup but for testing it would be a good data point as this would confirm if more than one drive has this problem.
In the meantime, you do have a workaround. I don't mean to make light of the problem but I feel better knowing that at least you can complete a successful backup.
If this is truly a Ghost issue, a fix most likely would not be forthcoming before your 60 day return period expires. I am a software engineer and fixes don't usually come out that quickly unless it is a fix for an emergency situation. By the time the problem is confirmed, root cause analysis done and a fix in hand along with testing time...
If this is something other than a Ghost issue, then hopefully we will have it resolved pretty soon.
You could chat with Customer Service and enquire further about the 60 day return policy if you want to do so.
With an internal drive, it's the BIOS that gives direct hardware level communication and drive translation.
For USB the BIOS has very little hardware support. Basically just keyboard, mouse, and small bootable flash drives.
It's the chip in the USB drive that gives it the drive translation.
Thats why I said it may be a problem with the USB drive and thats why some people here have trouble copying or cloning a drive too or from an external USB drive and then putting it in thier system and not having it boot.
I personally have had similar problems with large drives in external cases. I have one here that cannot correctly partition and format a large drive but seems to be able to read and write to it if I partition the drive inside my system connected to my motherboard.
So even though it tests fine with chkdsk, that only means that the drive doesn't have any surface errors not that the drive doesn't have problems with huge files.
If you could make the large image onto an internal drive and not the USB drive, then it would be a problem with the USB drive. If it failed doing it onto an internal drive I would agree with you it's a Ghost problem.
Another way you could test it is by putting another non-ghost file that big onto the USB drive and seeing if the drive could accept it. (might be faster).
If you have a tool like winrar or 7 zip, both of them have options to make non-compressed archives.
You could take that image that is split into 4GB pieces and create a non-compressed archive back onto your internal drive. When it's done and you have an 86GB file, move or copy it back to the USB drive and see if it goes all the way and you can open it without errors. Then I would also have to agree with you and say it's a ghost problem.
FWIT, I took the backup that is currently in 580 x 256Mb segments and used the recovery point browser to open it and copy it to a single file on the internal hard drive of the PC.
I watched the file start at that "magic" 89,796,428Kb size and expand to 123,470,084 Kb, then 145,919,188 Kb and then settle at the end to 145,207, 159 Kb. (Started at 91,951,542,272 bytes and ended up at 149,421,248,512 and settled at close at 148,692,131,840 bytes.
I then did a copy from the 146Gb file created from the internal hard drive to the USB drive in question and the file seems to have copied just fine.
I will do some testing to see if I can reproduce this. At this point I am not convinced this is a Ghost issue. For the first part of your test you used Ghost to copy your recovery point spanning multiple files back to a single large file on your internal hard drive and this worked, yet the initial backup to your USB drive does not work with a file this large.
If there were a problem with Ghost I would have expected both operations to fail, not just one.
This could still be a Ghost issue but the two data points are not consistent.
One other test you could do as I mentioned earlier is to use Ghost to back up to a different internal hard drive. This could even be the same as your source drive for purposes of this test assuming you have enough free space available.
Please try this and I will do some testing with my USB drive also. I will try to do that tonight and report back here with results. If this does turn out to be a problem with Ghost I will make sure it gets reported - I have a few Symantec contacts.
Just a quick update. I have added a bunch of data to one of my internal drives and now have ~150GB used.
I have to leave for work in a few minutes but tonight when I get home I will do a backup test without compression to my external USB drive.
Once this backup either completes or fails I will post results here. So you should have the word from me tonight as to whether I can reproduce this or not.
Another update for you. I just completed a backup of one of my internal drives with no problem. I used no compression and the resultant size of the backup image on my USB drive was 158,147,280,896 bytes or about 154GB. I used the One Time Backup option from the Tasks tab.
I have a few suggestions for you to try.
1) As I mentioned before, try a backup to a different drive and again for testing purposes the target drive can be the same as your source drive. I believe this will work and if so would indicate a problem specific to your external USB drive.
2) Question - are there any other software programs you have which use this external USB backup drive?
3) Please pull Norton Ghost log files. First, please check that Ghost is configured to save the correct log files. To do this click on the Tasks menu and select Options, then under Notifications please click on Log Files. Make sure Errors, Warning and Information are all checked. If not, please check them, click Apply and do another backup. If they are already checked then please attach the Norton Ghost.log.txt file to your post by clicking on the Add Attacment link at the bottom left. Also, please specify exactly what error is reported by Ghost when the backup fails. This should include the error number and any and all text reported with the error. You can find this log file in C:\ProgramData\Symantec\Norton Ghost\Logs.
3) Please run defrag on your external USB drive. Realistically this should not affect the ability to save large files, but we need to rule out the possibility that a fragmented drive could be a contributing factor.
4) In your first post it looks like you are backing up your SRP from the same backup job in which you back up the OS partition. I'd like you to try breaking up this backup job. First, your SRP will never change so it only needs to be backed up once. For this you can do a One Time Backup from the Tasks tab. Store this image away in a safe place, then please modify your regular backup job to include only the remaining OS partition and see if this makes a difference. Here again, I want to see if backing up multiple partitions from a single backup job could be a contributing factor.