I am trying to restore my Toshiba M45 Laptop from an external USB hard drive.  I am running Windows XP and I have a Ghost 12.0 system restore CD that is booting and functioning just fine.

When I try to restore from the most recent recovery image I receive the following:
Error ED800012:  The internal structure of the image file (CRC Check or Frame Header) is invalid, damaged, or unsupported.

Well I can browse the image just fine but whatever.  So I try the 2nd most recent image and at 39% it just stops, like the computer and the USB hard drive just stop talking.  The amount of time left starts climbing and the hard drive light on the laptop is not spinning.  After many minutes of sitting here doing nothing I can select cancel, but it tells me if I do so it will leave the target drive (my laptop hard drive) as unformatted.  It has done this 3 times in a row.  

I even ran the Toshiba recovery CD on the laptop hard drive and THAT worked fine, just to make sure I was trying to recover to an identically partitioned and formatted drive, in case that made any difference

If you might have any ideas, I will appreciate them.

ghostgal950,

Just a few questions.

How large is your laptop HD?
How many partitions on the HD?
How much used space and free space in the C: drive?
How large is your external HD?
Do you have another external HD?
Do the images pass "Verify".
You said you can browse the images. Can you mount them as a drive?
Do you have partitioning software?
Have you restored an image (recovery point) to this laptop in the past?

Thanks Brian, initial answers follow.

Just a few questions.

How large is your laptop HD?  80GB
How many partitions on the HD?  1
How much used space and free space in the C: drive?  Not sure.  I ran the Toshiba Recovery CD but I don't know if that reformatted everything or not.  If so, its a small % right now.  If not, I think the HD was at about 40GB.
How large is your external HD?   80GB
Do you have another external HD?  Yes but I copied some files on it in case Norton didn't work.  I think this second drive is 120.
Do the images pass "Verify".    I need to check this.  I turned it off as it was taking too long.   I am trying to do this now.
You said you can browse the images. Can you mount them as a drive?  I don't know how to try this but willing to learn.  
Do you have partitioning software?  No.
Have you restored an image (recovery point) to this laptop in the past?  I did a restore many moons ago with a prior version of Ghost.  However at the end of July I started all over again (fresh from the beginning with a new hard drive and a new install of the Toshiba Recovery CD and started adding to it, so on this new hard drive NO and with Ghost 12, No.

OK I just tried to do the restore of the most recent with Verify and 5% in now the Hard Drive and the USB drive appeared to stop talking to each other.  The minutes remaining jumped up to 96 then 97 then 98 after a few minutes of waiting I got the error message again:

Error ED800012:  The internal structure of the image file (CRC Check or Frame Header) is invalid, damaged, or unsupported.

I'll try Verify with the 2nd most recent file next.

Can you boot into Windows? If so, double click a recovery point (.v2i file) and the Recovery Point Browser will open. Select the .v2i file in the left pane and click the Verify icon. Does it pass?

Brian wrote on Sep 1^st, 2007 at 11:24pm:

Can you boot into Windows? If so, double click a recovery point (.v2i file) and the Recovery Point Browser will open. Select the .v2i file in the left pane and click the Verify icon. Does it pass?

The attempt to verify the 2nd most recent file also hung up but did not result in an error message, I eventually had to 'cancel', which leaves the target drive 'as unformatted'.  I am pretty sure Ghost hosed my clean Windows install when it hung again.

Hosed, can't boot.
I can do a fresh install of Windows  from the Toshiba Resovery CD if it will help.

At present we need to confirm whether the recovery points are valid or not. Your problem may be a hardware issue with the external HD.

Boot to the Ghost 12 CD. Click Analyze.
Click Explore My Computer
Browse to your recovery point on the external HD and select the point
Click Verify

If it fails to verify, connect the external HD to another computer, not the laptop, and copy the recovery point to your other external HD. Try to verify that recovery point from the Ghost 12 CD.

Did you tick Verify (in the wizard) when the recovery points were originally created?

OK I am doing the steps you suggested and will post back with results.  It's about 1/4 through verifying the most recent image.

I belive I had verify turned off.  Toshiba was a little buggy with the old version of Ghost.  With the new version of Ghost I think I was running into a prob where verify was getting in the way of creating the files and I read a recommendation somewhere to just turn it off.  The files and directories looked good in browse mode and I could recover individual files so it seemed everything was in order.

Thanks for your help and I'll post back in a while.  I see you are in Australia, its Midnigh here, which means I have been at this for about 12 hours today.  Yawn.

You must be tired. If the images verify we have a few options.
Try to restore from the other external HD
Create another partition on the laptop HD, copy the recovery point to that partition and restore from the internal HD
Try a network restore

The most recent image erred out when I tried to verify.

The 2nd most recent image got most of the way through and then the process just seemed to hang.  After waiting numerous minutes I figured it wasn't going to finish on its own.   I hit the cancel button and when the cancel completed I got a pop-up box telling me that the restore point is valid.  Don't know whether that can be trusted.

So I went to try the 3rd most recent restore point (the oldest I have which was created when I first bought Ghost).  But it just hung.  I am starting to think that there is a problem here with the communication with the USB Drive which is one of your possible approaches.

Ghost is hung right now still trying to open #3.  Will try putting them on the other external, wish me luck.

aha hmmmm Ghost unhung with an error message when I unplugged the USB drive.  Now I can try verifying the 3rd file.  Just another indication all may not be right in communicating with the USB drive.

Crud again.  Cannot get image to fully copy from USB drive to hard drive of my other laptop.  It has said 2 mins remaining for the last 10 mins.  Uh oh I didn't think of the fact I might not be able to recover these files.

On my 2nd external HD I had an image from 7.29, its essentially a dupe of my 3rd oldest image.  I was able to fully verify that image from the ghost CD.  Therefore I am going to try to do a restore from this image, and then try to manually add in any other files to the extent that I am able.

I will keep you posted but am starting to doze off so I will likely have to continue my posts tomorrow.  Eyes shutting involuntarily here.

ghostgal950 wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2007 at 1:11am:

On my 2nd external HD I had an image from 7.29, its essentially a dupe of my 3rd oldest image.  I was able to fully verify that image from the ghost CD.

Well, that's positive.

Your other external HD sounds sick.

One final post, I am now posting from the machine I restored.  I am missing about a months' worth but I think I can still recover most of it piece by piece.  

I guess it must be something with that USB Drive.  However I was thinking that perhaps it could be worth testing whether it is a malfunction in the interface to floppy drive (both of my externals consist of a laptop floppy drive in a USB housing kit).  So I may try swapping the housings tomorrow just to see if i can't get the most current restore point up and running.

Thanks for helping me out tonight Brian.  I don't think I would have come this far along without your advice and guidance.  Checking out for now,

Dawn in Chicago

ghostgal950 wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2007 at 1:48am:

One final post, I am now posting from the machine I restored.

Excellent.

We are thinking about a walk on the beach. Just under an hour to sunset.

Dawn, I like mounting recovery points. Right click the .v2i file and click Mount. Accept the drive letter. Now you have a virtual drive which I find easy to navigate and to copy and paste files and folders to other partitions on the HD.

When you are finished, right click and Dismount.

If you can restore the more recent images, that's even better. Keep us informed.

ghostgal950 wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2007 at 1:48am:

One final post, I am I guess it must be something with that USB Drive.  However I was thinking that perhaps it could be worth testing whether it is a malfunction in the interface to floppy drive (both of my externals consist of a laptop floppy drive in a USB housing kit).  So I may try swapping the housings tomorrow just to see if i can't get the most current restore point up and running.

OMG I can see I must have been tired last night.  Not floppy drives.  Each of my externals is a laptop HARD DRIVE in a USB housing kit.  Sheesh.  I'll try swapping the hard drives this morning after some coffee.

Hope you had a nice walk on the beach, sounds gorgeous!

After 12 hours I understand.

Are your external HDs powered by AC to a small DC power supply or are they the two USB connector type?

Brian wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2007 at 3:32pm:

Are your external HDs powered by AC to a small DC power supply or are they the two USB connector type?

The 2 external HD's were just powered by the USB connector.

Today I went out and bought a big new external with which is AC powered.  I never did switch the 2 externals and their casings as I just got fed up with it and decided to go do some other things with my weekend once I had the restore under control.

Reflecting on it with a clearer mind I have little doubt that the one drive was trashed.  If it was the connector, it would not have reliably bombed out in the same place each time.

With the new external, I am creating the image and verifying it at the time of the create.  It verified just fine.  So I probably was writing to a bad disk for the past month and not knowing it.  Thank GOODNESS I had a 2nd copy on a different drive that was only a month old.  

I want to say thanks again for your help the other night, you were really a big help1!

Dawn, I'm delighted that it worked out. Things didn't look good at first with that error message.


Quote:

Thank GOODNESS I had a 2nd copy on a different drive that was only a month old

Yes. Yes. Yes.