6.5 Disaster Recovery Problems

[Rgaddis]

First time I tried to recover using the Retrospect Disaster Recovery Disk, I seemed to have Retrospect. Then I was asked if I wanted to try the less drastic recovery methods of Microsoft XP before I continued with Retrospect. I answered yes and was taken back to the boot process of Microsoft which failed again.

 

Since that point I seem to only arrive at HP PC System Recovery which wants to wipe out the system and re-establish the pristine conditions of first use.

 

Even though I have the Retrospect Disaster Recovery disk in the drive, I am unable to get back to the point where that first question was asked. There is a minimized box down in the left hand lower corner and it seems to have a Retrospect symbol on it, but it is only visible very briefly and does not respond to clicking on it with the mouse.

 

I do not want to do the HP recovery, but wish to use the Retrospect image to re-establish the system. The paper with Retro instructions does not describe what I am seeing on the screen so I do not think Retro uses the HP PC Recovery process to do its work.

 

How do I get back to Retro?

[MRIS]

Can you confirm that the system is configured to boot from the CD-ROM (or DVD) drive?

 

You seeing the HP PC recovery suggests that it's still booting from the recovery partition rather than the optical drive.

 

If you can't get the PC to boot from the CD, then the next best option is to allow the HP recovery system to go ahead and recover the PC to pristine. Later you can install retrospect, rebuild (re-create) the catalog by getting it to read the disk based backup set, and then restore the system from there.

 

I will describe what to expect during a retrospect disaster recovery CD-Boot, since I did this a few years ago...

 

Basically you boot the PC from the recovery CD, which is essentially an carefully scripted unattended basic install of the Windows operating system to a sufficient state that it has basic functionality. This means network and storage drivers. Once the install is finished, a logon script runs that actually launches retrospect which then either prompts for the disk/tape that contains the data to restore. Normally when you create a DR CD, it collects the name and other details of a suitable backup set. Should this set no longer be available, for example, you've got newer ones, then you can also over-ride the pre-selected set and manually indicate which one. Once the restore starts, it fully replaces the hard disk contents with the data from the restore. Once complete it prompts for a reboot, after which the temporary files that were loaded for the restore get removed. After that you're pretty much back.

 

As you can see the DR is especially useful to people that don't have a capability to boot their machines from cold-metal. In your case, the PC Restore feature built into the hardware/BIOS appears capable of restoring the PC as well, so my advice is to allow it to work, then install retrospect later and then do your restore.

Edited April 20, 2008 by Guest