Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image
Started by Kris
Kris
Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 07 November 2012, 10:36 |
I'm running two RAM Disks with 3.3.2 under Windows 8 64 Pro. One is 7,000mb, the other is 20,000mb.
Both of them are set to back up to an image that is stored on an internal SSD (Samsung 830 256GB). They are set to back up every 30 minutes.
I'm finding is that when the PC is restarted, the 20,000mb image is corrupted every time.
What might be the cause of this, and how can I prevent it?
Cheers
Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 07 November 2012, 11:15 |
Admin Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 5 643 |
Kris
Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 07 November 2012, 21:26 |
Both images were formatted as NTFS. I originally did this through the RAM Disk software, however after it loaded the drives with corrupt images a few times, I tried reformatting the mounted drives in Windows using the built in tools and then letting the results be saved back to the images on the disc. The results seem to have been the same either way.
Both images are used as the basis for boot time disks.
The 7 GB image is more reliable than the 20 GB, but not infalliable either.
The 7 GB primarily supports all the random things that happen (cache, temp directories etc).
The 20 GB primarily supports the Data repositry for BOINC (World Community Grid) and is used as a scratch disc for video editing and so forth.
I have just reformatted both using FAT32 (formatted through the RAM Disk software). Touch wood, these seem to be loading and unloading just fine (but I have only rebooted twice).
David.Dai
Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 20 November 2012, 13:29 |
Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 21 November 2012, 17:18 |
Admin Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 5 643 |
inTagger
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 29 October 2013, 06:49 |
Ben
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 29 October 2013, 07:19 |
I've had this problem as well, but only since installing Win8.1.
Most of the time when I boot, the RAM disk is corrupted, so I need to restore it from a backup. (After that it works fine).
I'm going to try bumping up the "Save contents to associated image" option from 1 to 10 minutes and see how that goes.
Any other suggestions?
I saw in another thread a question about logon vs boot images. Which would you suggest?
inTagger
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 29 October 2013, 21:32 |
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 17 November 2013, 12:13 |
Admin Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 5 643 |
1. You had set up the RAM disk to periodically save data to an associated image file.
and/or
2. The image file became corrupted after the system had been restarted or turned off/on.
Thank you.
Kati
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 20 November 2013, 14:14 |
Kati
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 20 November 2013, 15:09 |
HDD emulation is "slower", but in what respect? It's probably still ridiculously fast compared to the typical SATA drive. I guess I'll run some tests to see what the difference actually is.
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 21 November 2013, 10:41 |
Admin Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 5 643 |
The HDD emulation is slower because there's an extra layer than reads and writes go through. Slower by how much, it depends on a few things, but by all means it's faster than a SATA SSD.
Asagrim
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 14 February 2014, 18:17 |
Also how does hard disk emulation affect random 4K r/w performance? I have a software that creates a single temp file, that contains up to thousands of appended temporary files it constantly modifies (rewriting the file entirely), so i'd want to make sure, that hard disk emulation doesn't nullify the benefit of not having to wear down my NAND cells too quickly.
Thanks!
Marzl
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 02 December 2014, 00:31 |
QuoteDavid.Dai
I've been using it for several weeks. It works quite well until this morning I started my PC and found the RAMDISK drive not accessible. When I clicked on the RAMDISK drive it asked me to format the disk. It seems that the image is corrupted.
Exact same problem here. I had version 3.4.5 when it happened. I just updated to current version (3.4.6) to see if this would magically solve it. It didn't.
The RAM Disk software seems to load the image file correctly (green icon in GUI), but the drive is not accessible as mentioned above. Is there a check to see if the image file is really corrupt and is there any way to repair it?
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 02 December 2014, 10:05 |
Admin Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 5 643 |
As to checking whether the image was really corrupt, just open it in any HEX-editor and see whether it looks like it contains a file system and files or it's just blank (all zeros).
Marzl
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 03 December 2014, 04:17 |
The longer I think about it, I think I narrowed my problem down. I was running out of space on my drive C: the other day. C: is where I save the image file to. I changed my RAM recently to 16 GB and presumably in the moment the RAM Disk Software tried to save the image file to C:, Windows took the chance of free space and increases the file size for pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys leaving not enough space for the RAM disk image file.
My presumption is that if the software is set up to write the image file every X minutes, it'll delete the image file right before it writes it again. It could be that moment the hard drive runs out of space so the file could not be written safely. At least that would be plausible to me. Is there check in Softperfect RAMDisk whether there is enough space left at all on the harddrive when re-writing the image file?
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 03 December 2014, 14:10 |
Admin Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 5 643 |
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 03 December 2014, 15:38 |
Registered: 8 years ago Posts: 62 |
QuoteMarzl
Finally I used HxD hex editor to check for the file for zeros. Yes, zeros almost everywhere, only a few bytes in the beginning are not zeros.
I couldn't reproduce this issue. Could you give us more detailed information about your system's version, installed applications, loaded modules, etc. You can run msinfo32, then select Save from the File menu and send us the .nfo file by email or post it here. Also, can you remember the options that you have specified while creating RAM disk at the time when the issue has occurred?
QuoteMarzl
My presumption is ... it'll delete the image file right before it writes it again.
No, RAM Disk does not delete image file before writing, because each time it only writes modified blocks. Furthermore, you can't delete image file while it is mounted as it is opened and locked by the kernel process, and thus this can't result in a corrupted image.
Jorge
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 20 February 2015, 07:49 |
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 21 February 2015, 16:22 |
Admin Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 5 643 |
If OSFMount cannot mount the image at the 4096 bytes offset, I am afraid the file system and data may be damaged beyond repair.
Jorge
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 23 February 2015, 03:29 |
Marzl
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 08 July 2015, 22:40 |
Sorry for that huge delay. I ran msinfo32 but saw a lot of personal data I don't like to share (paranoia :-/).
OSFMount solved it for me.
Although I set up a new RAM disk the last time, I still had a backup of the broken image file. Today that newer RAM disk broke, too, most likely by a different issue (will answer in a different thread). I tried OSFMount but it didn't work for the current RAM disk. Out of curiosity I tried it on the backup and that worked out great.
Marzl
sabl
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 09 July 2015, 12:24 |
Marzl
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 09 July 2015, 18:48 |
I just gave it a try, but it didn't work. OSFMount did not recognize the file system properly. In your screenshot under "File system (detected)" it says "NTFS/HPFS/exFAT", here it says "N/A". When I tried chkdsk as was suggested as next step it returned "CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives".
sabl
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 10 July 2015, 16:13 |
Person
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 23 November 2015, 10:09 |
I also couldn't uninstall the software to upgrade on Windows 10 and had to manually delete the registry entries and go into safe mode to delete the driver files.
RD
Uninstalling RAM Disk 23 November 2015, 12:35 |
QuotePerson
I also couldn't uninstall the software to upgrade on Windows 10 and had to manually delete the registry entries and go into safe mode to delete the driver files.
The article How to uninstall RAM Disk completely in SoftPerfect's KB helped me with RAM Disk uninstallation. I hope you too will find it useful.
Person
Re: Uninstalling RAM Disk 25 November 2015, 04:16 |
Thanks.QuoteRD
The article How to uninstall RAM Disk completely in SoftPerfect's KB helped me with RAM Disk uninstallation. I hope you too will find it useful.
Regarding the issue I posted earlier:
Today I found this warning log in my event viewer (drive H is the RAM drive):
QuoteThe system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur in VolumeId: H:, DeviceName: \\Device\\00000072.
({Write Protect Error}
The disk cannot be written to because it is write protected. Please remove the write protection from the volume %hs in drive %hs.)
It appears I have received this quite a few times during apparently normal operation.
Re: Uninstalling RAM Disk 25 November 2015, 09:45 |
Admin Registered: 12 years ago Posts: 5 643 |
QuotePerson
Today I found this warning log in my event viewer (drive H is the RAM drive):
The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur in VolumeId: H:, DeviceName: \\Device\\00000072.
({Write Protect Error}
The disk cannot be written to because it is write protected. Please remove the write protection from the volume %hs in drive %hs.)
It appears I have received this quite a few times during apparently normal operation.
It's by design. Writing to the disk is blocked when the data is being saved to to an image file file (as otherwise it would result in an inconsistent image).
If this is not suitable, I would recommend not to use an image file and use a file-level backup utility like Robocopy or Unison.
Person
Re: Corrupt RAM Disk - Saving to Image 26 November 2015, 14:17 |