Dave-H

Getting there! I now have two 'risers', and the correct eSATA card is now on its way to me! Just a quick question about the risers. They both have power connectors on them. One has more than the other, and that's the one I will use as it's physically slightly lighter. Am I right in assuming that those power connectors are there because the unit is designed to work with power-hungry powerful gaming graphics cards, which need more power than the PCI-E connector can provide? If so I guess I almost certainly won't need to connect them for my use.

The saga continues, I'm afraid. The people I ordered the card from are still trying to let me know whether their warehouse can actually supply the card I ordered! The PCI-E 'extender' I ordered still hadn't arrived several days after the last quoted delivery date. I reported this to eBay, and sent a message to the seller. It was supposedly despatched on January 31st, but is not recorded as delivered. I heard nothing, until I got a message from eBay saying my money had been refunded. I then ordered another one from a different source. Then, I got a message from the original seller apologising for the fact I'd not received the first one, saying he'd refunded the money, and he was sending another one! Oh dear! So, it looks as if I'm going to end up with two extenders, possibly three if the original one now arrives! I'll get there eventually!

Hi Dietmar. I don't have the power to do that I'm afraid. Tripredacus the forum supervisor may be able to do that, but the attachment quota for standard members is intrinsically limited I think. You will need to delete some older attachments to free up space. Cheers, Dave.

I'm rather hoping that I don't have to do that!

This is the half height bracket that was sent with the incorrect card I received. It should do the job I think, as the 'top bit' is definitely shorter than on a normal bracket, so hopefully the card will hang in the air high enough above the PCI-X socket below it to enable the PCI-E extender to go underneath it. I have spoken to the people I ordered the card from, and sent them a picture of the incorrect card. Hopefully they will come back soon to let me know if they can send the right one. Naughty I know, but if they want the other card back, I'm going to quietly keep that half height bracket just in case I can't find the right card supplied with one!

Ah, OK. I hope the Startech one I ordered will do the job. I'm not intending to try and boot from it. Cheers, Dave.

Is that the one I've ordered?

LOL! Unfortunately, I don't think that option will work, as the holes for the eSATA ports will still be in the same place on the bracket. It's the top bit of the bracket which would need to be 'trimmed' to raise the board clear of the socket below it, and of course if you do that you can't screw it to the case! I'm sure you weren't being serious anyway.........

Thanks @jaclaz! You don't call yourself "The Finder" here any more, but you should do! I never saw that when I was searching last week. If the people I've already ordered from can't actually supply what I want, I will certainly get a refund from them and probably buy that. One slight worry is that it doesn't look as if it necessarily comes with a half height bracket, which I will need if I'm going to mount it in the machine the way I want to.

If there had been a cheaper option available, I would have taken it in the first place!

Just a quick update. My card arrived yesterday, and turned out to be completely the wrong one. They've sent me a StarTech PCI-E card with no eSATA ports, just two SATA ports, which is useless to me of course! I also don't have the PCI-E extender yet either, but hopefully I will have that in a few days. When I get that, and the right card, I can go forward with this. Cheers, Dave.

OK, I ordered the ASMedia card. Hopefully I will have it early next week and I can give it a try. It comes with a half height bracket, so I hope with the extender it can go into the spare PCI-X slot space on my machine, even though it will be hanging in mid-air!

Thanks again @Andalu for the incredibly detailed response! Thanks @D.Draker too for the warning, I guess all I can do is try it and see! Although it's not physically identical to the one you showed @Andalu is this the right card? The cards aren't particularly cheap, but that's a StarTech one, and I've always found their hardware very well-made and reliable. It's no coincidence that the 3TB drive is actually in a StarTech enclosure!

That is a bit worrying, but I can't imagine that I would ever want to copy that much data all in one go! My PCI-E 'extender/riser' is coming soon, I hope. Any recommendations for exactly which ASMedia eSATA card I should look to buy? A half height one would be ideal, as with the appropriate bracket I can then hopefully get it into the spare PCI-X slot space that I have, with it plugged into the extender rather than the actual PCI-X socket on the board of course!

Thanks both. I've installed DiskGenius, the portable version of which works fine on XP, although the installer version won't install on XP. That will back up drives to files, although unlike the Windows backup files, you don't seem to be able to mount them and extract individual files from them, which is a shame. It also cannot back up the drive it's running on, but that's not too much of a problem with a multi-boot system, of course. I will look at the other options mentioned. Anyway, this is now all off-topic for this thread. Thanks for all the help everyone as always. I will post a new thread if I need more advice on backup systems, although which OS section I'm going to put it in I don't know! Cheers, Dave.

LOL, yes, good analogy! I was amazed to find that the 'Windows 7 Backup and Restore' system was still present in Windows 11, I would have thought they would have used that 'upgrade' as an opportunity to ditch it. They no longer support it, and have actually advised people to find alternatives to it, so why it's still there on new systems is a bit of a mystery. Having left it in Windows 11, I suppose they can't really just remove it now, as people will have made backups with it which would then become useless. Any recommendations for 3rd party system imaging programs? Free would be ideal, but not essential, but I would like something which will work on XP with FAT32 drives.

@D.Draker Yes, exactly the same BIOS version, in fact the replacement board has the BIOS chip from the previous board plugged into it! As the three week older System Image worked, it does look as if the problem with the more recent image had nothing to do with the hardware change. @jaclaz I have mounted all three of the vhdx files of the recent backup. They all mount fine, and I can see all the files in them. Why they won't actually restore is a mystery. As an aside, after running a Windows Update session, which has brought the system up to date again, KB5034441 is now trying (and failing) to install again. I find it quite unbelievable that even Microsoft would roll out an update that needs the Recovery Partition extended on some (many? all?) systems for it to install. How many Windows 10 users would have any idea how to do that?! Anyway, I'm obstinately not going to manually extend the partition for them this time, and will wait and let it fail multiple times in the hope that it will be fixed on the next patch Tuesday! Going back to the original problem, I know that the built-in legacy Windows 7 Backup and Restore system on Windows 10 (and surprisingly 11) is depreciated by Microsoft, and the wisdom is to not now use it and use 3rd party alternatives. After this experience, I think this might be a good idea! Any recommendations? There seem to be loads of alternatives. Ideally I would like something that's free and will also work on Windows XP. At the moment I do System Images of the Windows 10 disk every week, and just do a basic file copy backup of my Windows XP and 98 drives. If I could find something that would also do an ISO backup of those drives that would be good. Thanks again for the help as always. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks @jaclaz! They are vhdx files. I will put the new disk back in, and see if I can mount them OK and read their contents. Looking at the last successful restore, it restored the C: drive partition first, and then the System Reserved and Recovery partitions. The failed restore only seemed to restore the C: drive partition, and then failed with the 'parameter incorrect' message. So it looks as if it was trying to restore the System Reserved or Recovery partition which actually failed. I had increased the size of the Recovery partition to allow the KB5034441 Windows Update to install, which had kept on failing. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-kb5034441-security-update-fails-with-0x80070643-errors/ I increased it from 524MB to 1024MB. The new restore has of course put it back to 524MB. Whether this is relevant I don't know, as I'm sure that the failed restore was from an image made after the partition was resized.

Thanks guys, but panic (largely) over! As a last clutching at straws attempt, I dug out my old backup HDD, which had a System Image on it from the 1st January. To my amazement, it worked! Obviously very pleased at that, but that does beg the question as to why the much more recent System Image wouldn't work! It was made doing a routine System Image backup I do every week, and I had no reason to think that there was anything wrong with it. If you remember on another thread, we were discussing accessing 3TB GPT disks on XP? Well the image which has just worked was on the old 2TB MBR disk, the newer one on the new 3TB GPT disk. Whether this is at all relevant I do not know. I am now of course worried that System Images made to that disk might fail in the future. I'm just glad i got my system back, although it now needs a bit more updating of course! Cheers, Dave.

I have a problem with my Windows 10 installation! As can be seen from my signature, I have a triple boot machine. Windows XP and Windows 98 are absolutely fine. What happened was that I changed my motherboard as the original developed a fault. The replacement is exactly the same board, same make and model. All was working fine until suddenly, I couldn't boot into Windows 10, I just got an "Inaccessible Boot Drive" BSOD. I tried everything I could think of to fix this, there seemed to be no physical problem, the Windows 10 drive could be accessed fine from XP and 98, and all the files seemed to be there. A chkdsk run on XP did find some problems, and apparently corrected them, but no difference in Windows 10. Automatic repairs by Windows 10 did no good at all, and booting into a recovery environment and trying to rebuild the boot with fixboot etc. also made no difference. Eventually, to cut a long story short, I gave up trying to repair whatever was wrong, and decided to restore a System Image I had made some days before. What I suspect had happened was that the boot files on the drive had got damaged somehow, and chkdsk and fixboot couldn't repair them. The restore didn't work, it went through all the motions of copying to the C: drive, and then at the very end it said it had failed because "The Parameter is Incorrect". That is one of the most annoying error messages in Windows, (second only to "Access is Denied"), as it never gives you any clue as to what the parameter is and what's wrong with it! Anyway, I tried several times and it failed every time. I've no reason to think that there's anything wrong with the System Image. Having done this, of course my original Windows 10 installation was completely trashed, leaving me with an apparently unformatted drive when looked at in XP. I then did a clean installation of Windows 10, which worked fine. However, trying the System Image restore again just produced the same result and trashed the installation again! Has anyone any idea what could be wrong here? I did wonder if the System Restore is failing because the hardware has changed, even though the replacement motherboard is the same make and model, although I've done system restores before between computers with different hardware, and it's always worked. Unfortunately I didn't do another System Image after I changed the motherboard, I wish I had now of course! Is there any way to force the System Image onto the drive, perhaps with 3rd party software? Some programs claim to be able to do what they call a 'Universal Restore' which will allow you to put a system image from one computer onto another one with different hardware. Unfortunately, most seem to only be able to do that with System Images they have generated, not ones generated with Microsoft Backup and Restore. Any suggestions very gratefully received. I just want my highly personalised version of Windows 10 back! Thanks, Dave.

Thanks guys! That one on eBay looks interesting, I think I can risk a fiver on that, if only to just play with it! I've ordered it anyway, if I think it will do the job I'll then look into sourcing an ASMedia eSATA card. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks again! One of those extenders could potentially solve my problem, as I could then fit an ASMedia card using it, as long as the 'plug' end will go into the PCI-U socket, which it looks as if it will. You can see the PCI-U socket, the short blue one, at the bottom left of the board in the picture. I have a small card plugged in there at the moment which feeds my DVD drive, but that's using the SATA socket on the card top edge, the eSATA socket on the card side edge is inaccessible as that socket has no removable plate beside it like the other six slots above it as it's (I think) designed for an internal expansion card of some sort. Obviously, I wouldn't want the card flying around loose in the case, but I'm sure that can be sorted out!

My motherboard is a Supermicro X7DAL-E+ server board. I only tried the ASMedia driver on the Silicon Image eSATA card, as that's the only place I really need to use it.

Back again! No go I'm afraid. The ASMedia driver installed OK, and no BSOD on reboot this time, but the boot splash screen animation just moved very very slowly and never went any further. Trying in Safe Mode did produce a BSOD, the first time STOP 0x000000C2 (BAD_POOL_CALLER) and then the second time STOP 0x0000007E. It was worth a try though, thanks very much @Andalu! I guess I'm just going to have to accept that I'm not going to be able to use my 3TB disk on an eSATA connection with XP. The only answer would be to somehow get an actual ASMedia card into the system, which as they are only PCI-E is going to be physically impossible at the moment. I suppose there are no such things as PCI-E extender cables which will allow the card to be physically separated from its slot? There are right-angled spacers and that sort of thing, but none of the ones I've seen will work around my particular problem I'm afraid. Cheers, Dave.

Thank you again, especially for the links! I will try with that driver and let you know how I get on. Cheers, Dave.