Comparing 2 ~identical SATA boot drives: Errors emitted

[bc_for_life]

SUMMARY: Problem comparing 2 mostly-identical drives.

DETAILS:

I'm running MSWIN-XP SP2 on AMD PC hardware.

I have 2 physically identical SATA drives. Each drive has 2 partitions. The SATA controller is built on-board to the motherboard.

The partitions of each drive are identical and were created by a Ghost image copy.

Recently, I had to boot both drives, and mount the other drive as a different drive letter.

I ran Beyond Compare v3.2.4 to compare and to find what I expected were minor differences between the drives. These differences occur from booting and running a drive for a couple weeks ... simply doing things on the drive you actually boot from.

THE_PROBLEM: No matter how many times I try, the compare starts, but several minutes into it, it starts to emit errors from BC.

Is this a bug ?
Can somebody think of a work-around to allow me to essentially compare, and merge minor differences between entire drives ?

Thanks in advance for helping.

[chrroe]

Hi,

what errors exactly?
A screenshot might be helpful ...
Or at least the log output from BC.

Bye
Christoph

[Aaron]

In addition to the information Christoph suggested, are both drives currently booted and have been running for a couple of weeks? Are you using BC3 loaded on one of the machines, and accessing the other remotely? It is likely that some system files are not accessible or that you may be running into permission issues.

[bc_for_life]

Comparing 2 ~identical SATA boot drives: Errors emitted

(1) I have attached the GUI, screenshot

(2) I have attached the text-file, "bug report"

Thank you all, for your consideration.

Just want to compare to drives ... C:\ and M:\
... mounted, "ghosted" , images of other.

[Aaron]

Hello,

That's not an error, that's a full on Crash Report.

Were you able to Submit the full crash report via Email with the Send Bug Report button? If so, could you also send an email to [email protected] with a link back to this forum post, and let us know the email address you submitted the Crash Report with?

[Aaron]

From investigating the posted stack trace, it looks like the crash may be hitting a specific pair Version Compare (.exe, .dll) files. Are you running a rules based comparison?

[bc_for_life]

Comparing 2 ~identical SATA boot drives: Errors emitted

(1) The Scooter Forum post under discussion, is

http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbull...ead.php?t=7475

(2) Regarding my Session Settings: I have exported all Session Settings and
emailed them to [email protected]

(3) You ask, "Are you running a rules based comparison ? " . I do not believe so.

* I go into explorer.exe, and browse.
* I select C:\ , right-click, select the "half-BC-yin-yang" , icon
* I then select M:\ , right-click, select the "full-BC-yin-yang" , icon
* Then, the BC comparison starts ...
* ... and manages to run for up to 5 minutes, before the crash occurs.

Thank you, Aaron.

[Chris]

I sent this by email, but I'll also post it here for anyone monitoring the thread:

I checked your settings, you are defaulting to a rules-based comparison, it is probably a crash caused by rules-based compare of an .exe or .dll file.

If you can narrow the crash down to a specific file or pair of files, please email us example files.

Removing rules-based comparison from your Folder Compare defaults should prevent the crash. To change the defaults, open BC and go to the Saved Sessions list. Expand "Edit session defaults". Select "Folder Compare". In the Comparison tab, uncheck "Compare contents" and save the changes.

[bc_for_life]

FOLLOWUP: After (minor) struggle with the UI to turn off "rule-based comparison", the comparison of these 2 disk drives did continue, to satisfactory completion.
Thank you, Scooter.

[Aaron]

You can change the settings before loading the Session in the Home screen by selecting the session and editing the settings on the right. This way you are not fighting to change the settings as the session is loading and running the comparison.

Disabling the Rules-based compare probably means you ran a Timestamp/Size comparison. If you can find the specific pair of files (a single .exe or .dll file) in your folder, you can exclude it from the comparison and re-run a full Rules-based compare.

We would be interested in an email if you find the problem .exe or .dll. Double-clicking on the file and launching the Version Compare should trigger a similar crash on the problem pair of files. If you are interested in tracking this further, please let us know if you can find that pair. If you can rename the .exe to .txt to avoid spam filters, that would be helpful when emailing us.

Thanks. And let us know if you have any questions.