Lessons learned while trying to do a Windows 10 Disaster Recovery

[x509]

The Windows Disaster Recovery software is built on WinPE.  WinPE has assigned drive letters in a different order than normal Windows.  PROGRAMS to assigned to Drive E, not C.

 

Selection of the snapshot to restore.  Catalog is stored on DATA, which is drive C here, but normally is drive D.

 

Restore Wizard wants to restore to drive C, but WinPE has renamed drive to E:, so Restore Wizard won’t work.Using Advance Mode also didn’t work, because Retrospect could not find the backup dataset.  I think that problem is due to the fact that I used a partition manager to resize the 2020 Backup partition on my drive G, which WinPE assigned to drive D.

 

 

Job failed with 1101 file/directory not found error.

 

 

 

[x509]

Sorry for the double post of a screenshot, or in this case, an iPhone photo of my screen.  This forum makes it hard to delete an image, once posted.

In any case, I can summarize by saying that the Recovery Wizard won't work.  Advanced Mode might have worked, but I had a second issue with the backup set member not being found.

[mbennett]

This is how I've been able to use the Disaster Recovery CD.  I found my notes, so this should be pretty good, but I'm made a few edits.

1. Boot up with Retrospect emergency CD.  Make sure you use the correct 32 / 64 bit version for the crashed system.

 

2. Initialize the drive every single time.  If you completely start over for some reason just init the drive again, but make sure your situation is unrecoverable.  Read the last paragraph.

 

2a. The biggest problem I've had at this point is obtaining the correct Network card driver. You can find that somewhere on the internet and put it on another CD or USB drive and load it as part of the initialization procedure.

 

3. Select to restore as client.  The IP address will be displayed (requires DHCP to be running on the network.)

 

4. Go to the Retrospect server.  Select to restore from the left menu bar, and create a new client during that process.  It will find the client running, named "minit-xxxxxxx" and do not rename.  Don't worry about the drive letters.  (I have also gone to Configure | Clients and setup a new client there.)

 

5. Select the PC snapshot you want to restore, with the temporary client name as the target.  Select the second bullet to restore the system state, registry and all files.

 

6. Once the restore is complete, reboot the client computer.  If it doesn't boot it may be because the bit version was incorrect at step one, so try using a Windows emergency disk for the correct 32 / 64 bit system and repair the system.

 

Generally speaking this works fine.  The last time I used it the restore hung at about 98% complete and never finished.  After almost an hour I eventually rebooted the client, cursing under my breath, and restarted the whole procedure.  After I launched the restore job (new client name) Retrospect chewed for a few minutes and decided almost all of the files had been restored already, restored the very few remaining and the job was completed in less than ten minutes.  I was extremely grateful.

 

I hope some of this is useful for you.  Good luck.

Mark

[x509]

Mark,

Thanks.  I can confirm that I created an x64 version of the DR CD (err, USB but functionally the same).

I did not initialize the drive in advance.  I'll try that later tonight.

Since I'm trying to do a local restore, network drivers aren't an issue for now, but will become an issue for LAN client recovery.  I sure as heck don't want to resort to a Windows Emergency disk to do a repair.  See the last paragraph of this post I did just about the same time you were replying.  See about Macrium Reflect.