Applications that are built on ESENT and run on a Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 or Windows-7-based computers may not work correctly after the reported physical sector size of the storage device changes.
This article applies to:
- Acronis Backup & Recovery (All Editions)
- Acronis Disk Director (All Editions)
- True Image 2013 by Acronis (All Editions)
- Acronis True Image Home (All Editions)
Symptoms
When performing a restore or cloning operation to a destination disk that has a different physical sector size, all applications, based on ESENT technology may no longer work.
As a symptom, you may get a Windows Update error similar to this:
"Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running, you may need to restart your computer."
“FATAL: Failed to initialize datastore, error = 0xC8000222.”
The following are examples of applications that are built on the Extensible Storage Engine API (ESENT), which may malfunction in these situations:
- Windows Update
- Active Directory
- Windows Desktop Search
- Certification authority (CA)
- Windows Internet Name Service (WINS)
- Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
- Windows Live Mail
Cause
The size of the physical sector is stored during the creation of ESENT database. Between the sessions, the ESENT module expects to have a consistent data. If the sector size changes between sessions, it reports an error.
The general reason of the problem is that the size of the source drive is 512 bytes per sector and the sector size of destination drive is 4096 bytes. The disks which have a new sector size by default are called Advanced Format Drives. Restoring the data/cloning the drive to such disks causes inconsistency in ESENT database and it has to be updated.
Solution
If you experience the issue on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, please install the Hotfix, provided from Microsoft in this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2470478
If you experience the issue on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, please install Windows Update rollup from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018
(!) The issue does not apply to Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
More information
See also: