#20 ODIN 0.34 crash restoring whole disk, multiple-partition, backup over disk with different partition structure.

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

I made a backup of a 4GB SATA SSD with (2) NTFS partitions, one custom/non-NTFS/non-FAT partition, and some unpartitioned space. Though not necessary as no partition was greater than 2000MB, the option to max out at 2000 MB file size was set. Also, Save only used blocks, and GZip compression were selected. The whole disk was backed up. In any event, the files the backup created were something like this: foo.mbr, foo-Partition10000.img, foo-Partion20000.img, and foo-Partition30000.img. When I tried restoring the whole disk by selecting the foo.mbr file, the software reported that it could not find the .img files. Manually renaming the .img files to foo-Partition1.img, foo-Partion2.img, foo-Partition3.img fixed this problem, but then when I tried restoring the whole disk to a larger 8GB SSD, I got this message:

Warning
/!\ The available disk space on the target drive is larger than the size of the image to restore. Do you want to continue (NTFS will be resized by you should run chkdsk /f afterwards.)?

I clicked Yes.

Immediately I got this:

Error

/!\ Exception of type Windows Exception thrown, cause: Failed to open partition or volume \Device\Harddisk1\Partition2. Object Name not found.

Upon pressing OK, one may attempt to start the restore again.

Error

/!\ Exception of type Windows Exception thrown, cause: Failed to open partition or volume \Device\Harddisk1\Partition1. {Access Denied} A process has requested access to an object, but has not been granted those access rights.

The problem persists until the disk is "dismounted" and "remounted". The problem is caused by re-partitioning. When the disk is repartitioned, it becomes inaccessible. Dismounting and remounting the disk clears the error because when it is remounted, the device being restored to has partitions that match the restore media partition structure. At this point, restore succeeds.

This report is for Windows 10, but may apply to other relatively modern Windows version after Windows XP. Windows XP seems to handle auto-remount of a USB-attached disk after re-partitioning.

Aside from this, and the file naming issue unrelated to OS version, ODIN 0.34 seems to generally work fine on Windows 10.

Kudos to foresight to fully backup unmounted partitions even when the option to store only used space is selected! The non-NTFS/non-FAT, unmounted third partition was storage for a unique system service and unused space would have been impossible for ODIN to determine. ODIN restored this special partition with no loss in functionality to the supported service.