Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[OtC]

I installed the new drive and cloned the old one onto it using DiscWizard. The old drive was renamed as D: and the new one became C:

I verified I can boot off the new drive and everything seemed to be ok, all files present etc. I can also see the D: drive.

My problem is that I have a scheduled task to do a backup using NTBACKUP. This has run flawlwssly for a year or so, but now when it runs, I get the Blue Screen of Death (TM) with the message BAD_POOL_HEADER (IIRC)

The backup goes to an external USB drive (F, I have checked the external drive and it's ok, I can see teh fies in Explorer. I have checked NTBACKUP and it starts up ok. I have used NTBACKUP with the external drive and the new C: drive and both fail once the process starts.

Therefore the problen is not the external drive. It's not the new C: drive. It's not the copy of NTBACKUP, it's something that happens during the backup, and the last message I see out of NtBACKUP is something about Shadow.

Have I missed a part of the cloning process? Has the cloning process switched of Shadow? I have looked in the BIOS setup and cat's see any way of switching it on or off.

All help appreciated as the help lines aren't open until Monday.

[RAsg]

Hello,

I had that error and blue screen occur before with a different backup application.  This is how I corrected it. 

Go to Display Properties and Advanced settings for your Video Card.  Locate an option for Write Combing and uncheck it.  You will have to reboot then go try the backup.

Regards,

[Roth]

I've got the same problem.  Installed a new drive ST303204N1A1AS-RK.  Used seagate software to clone my old drive to this one.  Running Norton Ghost to backup to a network drive or an attached firewire drive.  Every time I get the BAD_POOL_HEADER Blue Screen.  I unchecked the Write Combing option for my video card but it did not make a difference.

[JoeEag]

I am having the SAME problem after installing a ST303204N1A1AS-RK

I used the disk Utility that cam with the harddrive

Everything else seams to work ok Just NTBACKUP

Joe

[cdepiano]

I recently installed a different model SATA drive and have been having the same problem, "BAD_POOL_HEADER" BSOD.  I thought it had something to do with Outlook as I could make the system crash almost at will by opening the program.  I decided to log on as a different user (Administrator).  I could run any program repeatedly without getting the BSOD.  I decided to load my email into Outlook on that user and it worked fine.  I figured I must have corrupted my user account during the drive transfer process.  I just finished creating a new user account and transferred all by my data from the corrupted account (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811151).  Hope this helps.

Update:  The symptoms returned a few days after I made the change.  I traced the problem to the TCP/IP protocol. Whenever I disabled the NIC the problem went away.  Using a different NIC provided no relief.  I was unable to repair it so I had to reinstall Windows.  Obviously there is something going on with the Diskwizard software; it's the common link here.

Message Edited by cdepiano on 01-02-2008 09:58 AM

[RMJohnson]

Yo tambien.  On Dec 23 I installed a new ST3500360A PATA drive and cloned it with Diskwizard.  Everything looked great, I was really impressed until I tried to use my EMC Retrospect back up software.  I can still back up my other drives and clients but anytime the software starts a back up of the new drive I get a hard crash.  After talking to EMC they had me turnoff the "reboot on error" and then I could see the blue screen with the Bad_Pool_Header information.

I hope someone from SeaGate can help us.  I ran every drive fix and tried turning off indexing service, all boot up programs, etc.  nothing helps, still crashing.  I will take a look at my dump file, but I think this is probably a clone error of some sort at a very basic drive level.

Ross Johnson

[AlanM]

Hi:

Thanks for your participation in the our forums so far. Please remember that this is an online community where many of the responses come from other users, such as yourself. The forum is not a replacement for Customer Service. Seagate representative do from time to time come to lend a hand answering posts but not necessarily on a continual or frequent basis. If you have immediate needs, your best bet is to contact Customer Service directly whether by phone, email, or chat.
Thanks.

-AlanM
Admin

[RMJohnson]

Dear Fellow Travelers

After experiencing the BSOD Bad_Pool_Header when trying to do a Retrospect back up my newly cloned drive created by Disk Wizard, I contacted Seagate Support who explained that BSOD problems were Microsoft's responsibility,  I would find help there.

At the MS technician suggestion I did the tests suggested more than once, repair disk tools, defrag the drive using both Windows and Seagate’s SeaTools disk analysis.  None of these tools showed any problem with the disk.  Windows did not crash when the Retrospect Professional back up program was started in Safe mode.

The engineer at EMC Retrospect told me that the BSOD Bad_Pool_Header was likely caused by the cloning process, i.e. Disk Wizard.  He suggested that the problem was in the disk indexing and after some experimentation with turning the disk indexing off, he determined that I would need to reinstall windows to address the problem.  I have a XP Home SP1 disk which would have meant that I would have to reinstall SP1 and then reinstall the SP2, a long process.  I opted to upgrade to XP Professional with SP2 and I installed it this evening.  Note that this program is expensive but I felt that I was not going to be successful relying on Seagate Support as reinforced by the email I received tonight from them which recommended that I contact MS support services.  I believe if the disk error in indexing is indeed the cause, it is a Seagate/Aconis problem but they perhaps do not have the technical expertise to address BSOD problems.

Reinstallating Windows fixed the problem.  I am now able to backup my new Seagate PATA 500g C drive flawlessly with Retrospect Professional: problem solved.  There were several other people in the Seagate support forum that experienced a similar problem with NTBACKUP who may benefit from my experience.    

Best of luck and best regards,

Ross

Message Edited by RMJohnson on 01-09-2008 04:17 AM

Message Edited by RMJohnson on 01-09-2008 04:20 AM

[kam33mitch]

I've had a question into tech support for three days now with no answer.  If you google around you'll see a lot of people are coming up with this exact problem.  It doesn't matter if your using MS backup or any other backup software, it's doing the same thing.

I can also add that going from PATA to SATA is not the only cause.  I have two systems doing the EXACT SAME THING with completely different specs.  Different CPU, graphics card (ATI vs nVIDIA) RAM size etc.  I cloned one PATA to SATA and one PATA to PATA.  Doesn't matter.

This is really screwy since I can't find anything else wrong with the drive or the clone process but I really hate not being able to backup my drive.

[Bi3ll]

Similar problem with NTBackup after cloning C: drive: blue screen of death, forced shutdown, 'serious error message' from Microsoft upon restart.  Microsoft's automated response after reporting error was 'a driver problem'.  Re-ran NTBackup in Safe Mode with same result but got a diagnostic screen saying 'catastrophic error' and alluding to 'volume shadow'.  Re-ran NTBackup again and checked the 'disable volume shadow copy' box in Advanced options and it worked fine.  Don't quite know what I'm missing without volume shadow but at least I have most files backed up.