pappyon Posted September 21, 2004 Report Share Posted September 21, 2004 After doing a Disaster Recovery using a CD made with the step-by-step instructions given on the Dantz web site my Maxtor 300 USB drive is not recognised, and this is where my backup sets are. I know that this drive is supposed to be supported, as it says this on the Dantz web site. Surely that's what external drives are for! I have to end up doing a full install of Windows XP before I can access my backup sets. This should not be the case. When I try to reboot to the System drive I get all sorts of error messages such as NTLDR is missing, ntdetect.com is missing etc etc, so obviously I can't boot from C to use a more complete temporary system that would allow me access to Device Manager to reinstall the Maxtor Drivers. It also says on the Dantz web site that you can reboot to the Disaster CD a second time and it will AUTOMATICALLY begin a more complete temporary system. This doesn't happen, it just takes me back to the same situation. I have burnt a second Disaster Recovery Disk in case I had made a mistake with the first one, but it makes no difference. I even tried burning the Maxtor drivers on to the Disaster Recovery CD, but even that didn't help. I have tried moving my Maxtor to another USB port, and that makes no difference either. I bought this Maxtor drive and the Retrospect 6 software to make Disaster Recovery simpler, and the exact opposite has happened. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pugwash Posted September 21, 2004 Report Share Posted September 21, 2004 I can't even get as far as making the CD image. My DR fails due to a file sharing problem (see my post), which I can't resolve. it looks like windows has an exclusive lock on the atapi.sys file. Presumably you got past that stage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted September 27, 2004 Report Share Posted September 27, 2004 Hi Retrospect disaster recovery runs in two stages. USB2 devices are not visible in the first stage. When Retrospect comes up in 16 color mode quit Retrospect. Do not boot from the CD at this point. The machine will reboot and continue with the disaster recovery. Thanks nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pappyon Posted October 2, 2004 Author Report Share Posted October 2, 2004 Hi Nate, Thank you for your response to my post, and apologies for my belated response. If I could quote from your post viz: "Do not boot from the CD at this point. The machine will reboot and continue with the disaster recovery". This is when I get the error messages I mention in my previous post "NTLDR is missing", "ntdetect.com is missing" "hal.dll is missing" etc. and the machine won't boot. I have tried installing these files in the root of my C drive using Windows XP Recovery Console and it makes no difference. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ad572 Posted October 18, 2004 Report Share Posted October 18, 2004 Quote: Hi Nate, Thank you for your response to my post, and apologies for my belated response. If I could quote from your post viz: "Do not boot from the CD at this point. The machine will reboot and continue with the disaster recovery". This is when I get the error messages I mention in my previous post "NTLDR is missing", "ntdetect.com is missing" "hal.dll is missing" etc. and the machine won't boot. I have tried installing these files in the root of my C drive using Windows XP Recovery Console and it makes no difference. Hi Pappyon, I don't have a solution for you, but I can give you an Amen. You and I might be expecting too much from the bootable CD, or overestimating how easy this hardware/software combination will make our restoration efforts--I don't know, but read on. This past weekend, I put my Maxtor OneTouch 250G USB to the test hoping to save some time in the replacement of a hard disk on a Win2k box that was reporting some bad blocks (the harbinger of failure ). I used the Retrospect Express 6.0.222 OEM included with the Maxtor drive to create a complete "Backup" ("Progressive backup of selected sources") of the dying 20G drive (formatted as a single FAT32 partition) to the external Drive, then dutifully performed the "Disaster Recovery" function to create the bootable CD iso image, and I managed to burn that successfully. After installing the new (larger, 40G) drive, I can't recall what if anything I did partitioning wise before the restore--I believe the drive was virgin at that point. I then popped in the bootable CD Retrospect created, and booted from the CD drive...hoping to be impressed beyond belief with the ease of Disaster Recovery. Like you, I got to the point where Retrospect restore was looking for my backup volume set. Only the internal hard drive and CD drives were showing. When I hit the "choices" button though, my USB-connected external disk was nowhere to be found. It's as though the Windows 2000 setup program lacked the driver for USB Mass Storage devices. I tried (as the previous poster suggested) to quit out of Retrospect and let it reboot. Unfortunately, like you, I also got the NTLDR missing error stuff, and had to throw up my hands in defeat. I had to get a functional system by Monday, so I made a futile attempt to use the MaxBlast software that came with the new 40G internal drive to copy the old disk over in a bootable state, but that failed as well--after an hour or so of copying, I rebooted only to be greeted by Win98 command prompt. Odd for Win2k I'd say! Finally, I had to resort to the dreaded OEM windows image cd's and install everything from scratch and reconfigure the world, and all that stuff. I've noticed (now that I've just read it ) that the Maxtor OneTouch user guide's "Restoring your complete system" procedure (page 60) recommends that you install your operating system to the computer first, reinstall Retrospect, and One Touch on that OS installation, open Retrospect, do Repair Catalog, recreate from disks, all disks, build catalog file, Restore, Entire Volume, then Replace. This sounds like a pain in the butt, but it also sounds like it should work, of course, since the "reinstall your operating system and the software" dance solves the "Retrospect can't see the USB drive" issue that you and I are seeing when we skip that step. Anybody know a more elegant solution? Is there a way to specify the USB Mass Storage drivers by pressing F6 during the Windows setup load from the bootable CD? Or did Maxtor just license an inelegant solution and hope that no one ever noticed until they tried that first restore? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ad572 Posted October 18, 2004 Report Share Posted October 18, 2004 Quote: After doing a Disaster Recovery using a CD made with the step-by-step instructions given on the Dantz web site my Maxtor 300 USB drive is not recognised, and this is where my backup sets are. I know that this drive is supposed to be supported, as it says this on the Dantz web site. Surely that's what external drives are for! I have to end up doing a full install of Windows XP before I can access my backup sets. This should not be the case. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case. I go into more detail in another post, but I'm curious if this is the procedure you followed from the Dantz web site: TITLE: DISASTER RECOVERY INFORMATION for Windows XP-Retrospect 6.x http://kb.dantz.com/display/2n/index.asp?c=&cpc=&cid=&cat=&catURL=&r=0.3294947 The picture seems to be getting clearer for me that the bootable CD approach won't work for without an OS reinstall UNLESS your backup hardware is natively supported by Windows Setup. Since you and I are using USB hard drives, it appears that USB hard drives are among those things Windows setup doesn't support off the CD. The thing I'm curious to test though is if the ole "press F6 if you need to install a third-party SCSI or RAID driver" in windows setup might be an avenue to providing the USB mass storage driver to Windows for use during that boot. It'd be handy if Dantz or Maxtor tech support might divine a procedure for that in their lab and report back. :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted October 21, 2004 Report Share Posted October 21, 2004 Is it me or is the Maxtor manual - badly laid out and written, it jumps all over the place from one OS to another. I am getting really worried about DANTZ and Maxtor for my backup and D/R solution for my personnal laptop. Is there anywhere an easy to understand manual that covers all these problems I keep seeing on this forum ? You do know we are talking about data backup - as in unique data.. when its gone its gone. This probably isn't the best place to have moan, but did anyone else re-format their Maxtor to NTFS and then realise you can't unformat it or even partition it. I am only trying to get a mirror image of my laptop onto the Maxtor USB/FW 250GB EHD from an Acer 60GB laptop - am I missing the point or is this the wrong software bundled to use ? Cheers Peter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dld Posted October 21, 2004 Report Share Posted October 21, 2004 Peter... I'm not sure just what your problem is. I use Dantz Retrospect Express 6.0.222 with a Maxtor USB2 OneTouch external HD. My manual is put out by Maxtor, called Maxtor OneTouch User's Guide, 74 pages. Are you not able to do a backup of your system, as well as a Duplicate of drive C? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poolman5 Posted October 31, 2004 Report Share Posted October 31, 2004 natew's advice helped me successfully restore my backup to a new hard drive. On my first attempt I couldn't see my USB2 external hard drive (Pockey) and it also couldn't find a nt4_mini file (or something like that) so I mistakenly inserted a spare WinXP Pro UG cd I had handy since I'm away from home and loaded the nt4_mini file from that and continued. When it asked for a previous installation of Win, I realized I'd made a mistake but couldn't abort the automatic setup. I proceeded anyway and, in the end, when my computer rebooted it said it couldn't find that hal.dll file and I was stumped. Sooo... I started over again by formatting the new drive, inserted the Retrospect recovery CD, booted, proceeded to the "specify location of backup file", cancelled, rebooted without CD. Windows continued installing with only one issue: It stopped twice wanting that nt4_mini file and since I couldn't locate it without resorting to my UG CD I just closed the dialogue box... and it continued without problem. Success. Saved me having to have my system restore discs Fedexed across the Pacific. I'm happy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
woothok Posted November 14, 2004 Report Share Posted November 14, 2004 Hey all, I experienced the exact same problems mentioned above. (BTW, TonyZ, i *Also* accidentially reformated my Maxtor by mistake. Argh. I also managed to screw up my BIOS settings as well, and utlimately had to reset the BIOS jumpers so that I could clear up my BIOS mistakes, then reinstall my old drive and redo my full backup. Talk about creating lots of extra work for yourself.) w.r.t the disaster recovery step: What worked for me was to insert the Windows setup CD into my CDROM when I was at the "NTLDR not found" stage. My plan was to simply reinstall windows the normal way, but in fact what happened is that the Dantz disaster recovery mode took over and continued to do a full install. This was evident by the way the command prompt was set up (still was called "DRDOS" or something), and when it was done, it announced that this was a disaster recovery installation, the machine would reboot and Retrospect would start. Which is exactly what happened, and now the USB drive was visible and all went well from there. I would also add that I do not have the WinXP SP2 CD,; I used a disaster recovery CD and snapshot that were both made after installing the SP2 patch via download. So hopefully this will work for you folks as well. I will admit to being dumbfounded that Dantz would OEM this "solution" (which is not documented) with an external USB drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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