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Disaster Recovery Drivers


johnwmreed

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In Creating a Retrospect Emergency Recovery Disc the Windows Retrospect 8 User's Guide Addendum says:

 

Before you create an Backup Recovery ISO image, make sure you have the following items:

 

Any drivers or packages (i.e. package.cab) that you would like to add to the ISO image should be placed in the following directory before creating the ISO image.

<retrospect application>/drsupp/drivers

 

Ok, I placed a copy of my ethernet driver directory as a subdirectory in my Retrospect 8.0/drsupp/drivers directory, created the recovery iso file and burned it to a DVD. But when I do a trial run of the the Disaster Recovery I can't find the drivers.

 

So where are the drivers hiding? Or, am I placing them in the wrong place?

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A few things to check:

 

Regardless of whether your Windows OS and hardware are 32- or 64-bit, by default Retrospect Emergency Recovery Disc is created to run in 32-bit. So the drivers in the drsupp/drivers folder must be 32-bit ones, not 64-bit. To verify if you have the right drivers, boot from the Emergency Recovery Disc and follow the Addendum's "Loading drivers" section to load your ethernet drivers manually and see if networking becomes enabled. If not, hold down the SHIFT key while clicking "Restore locally" from the home screen of the Emergency Recovery Disc to get a command prompt, and see if the X:\Windows\System32\Drivers folder contains the .sys file(s) for your ethernet hardware you have loaded. If the related .sys file(s) aren't there:

- the driver may be 64-bit instead of the required 32-bit

- the driver file set doesn't include an .inf file

- some files referenced by the driver's .inf file are missing

 

Sometimes hardware vendors package their drivers with an installer .exe, instead of directly exposing the .inf and .sys files needed by Microsoft's (WinPE) tools used by Retrospect to load drivers for the Emergency Recovery Disc. In this case, the necessary driver files including the .inf and .sys may be extracted, or installed and then collected, on Windows based on the vendor's installer documentation.

 

Once the driver is working using the "Loading drivers" method manually, you can put the files in the drsupp/drivers folder and recreate the Retrospect Emergency Recovery DIsc so that it will be automatically loaded.

 

Please share with us your findings so that we can improve knowledge base articles and future documentation.

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Regardless of whether your Windows OS and hardware are 32- or 64-bit, by default Retrospect Emergency Recovery Disc is created to run in 32-bit.

 

This works because 32-bit Retrospect Emergency Recovery Disc (like 32-bit Windows) can run on 64-bit hardware.

 

you can put the files in the drsupp/drivers folder and recreate the Retrospect Emergency Recovery DIsc so that it will be automatically loaded

 

After creating the Emergency Recovery Disc, log files in the C:\Windows\Logs\DISM folder contains various details of the disc creation process, including results of installing drivers found in the drsupp\drivers folder.

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Two questions:

 

1. The directories created by the disaster Recover Disc process are:

BOOT

EFI

SOURCES

and these have subdirectories. Where in these directories are the driver files?

 

1. When you start the recovery process you have to load the NAS driver. So I need to know where it is located, right?

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  • 2 months later...

The Retrospect Emergency Recovery Disc boots WinPE, which loads installed drivers automatically, like Windows does. If you use the Retrospect app to "Load drivers for network or storage adapters" (link to user guide), it invokes WinPE tools to have WinPE load the .inf you specified, and the related driver files referenced by the .inf.

 

All these occur on a RAM disk (X:) created by WinPE from the .wim file located in the SOURCES folder. The RAM disk WinPE is running from is discarded when WinPE shuts down. Installed drivers are under X:\Windows\System32\Drivers. They include:

- drivers built into WinPE

- drivers installed into the .wim file when creating the Retrospect Emergency Recovery Disc

- drivers temporarily loaded by WinPE tools invoked by Retrospect app to "Load drivers for network or storage adapters" (such drivers are "forgotten" when WinPE shuts down because they are not installed into the .wim file)

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