'no ntldr' error / end of my rope

[mkiparsky]

I seem to be out of my depth here, but after entirely too many hours, Im not sure where else to go at this point. Read all the posts which seem related, but even if they contain the clues I need, I wasn't able to make the connections as a retrospect newbie who is NOT very techie. Anyhow, here goes...

 

-After making a single backup to a Lacie external drive using retrospect 6.5 with Windows XP, my brand new (1 month old) Dell laptop harddrive crashes.

-Dells sends new harddrive, and I spend the morning reinstalling windows.

-I make a new catalog file from my backup set, and try to restore my entire C: drive. This seems to go fine, except that, although I thought I created only one backup set, there are two listed to restore from, and the only way I can get it to restore was to allow it to skip one of the sets. [i failed to take notes on this part, so I'm sorry if this description is fuzzy]

-Immediately after the restore, things look OK: My documents and most of my applications seem to be there now (with the exception of my microsoft apps), although my desktop has not been restored.

-Reboot.

-Get error about 'Can't find NTLDR.'

-Call Dell, whose tech, after many attempts to hack around this, gives up and makes me reinstall windows AGAIN.

 

One day of work lost on my research, and at 1/2 day per failed iteration, I can't afford to start again without some guidance. I spent the big bucks for this software (I'm a grad student) to avoid just this sort of thing.

Help me, Obi Wan!

 

Thanks,

Mike Kiparsky

[natew]

Hi

 

"skipping as set" doesn't sound quite right. Skipping a member maybe? How many tapes did it take to do your backup? It sounds to me like you have accidentally overwritten tape #1 in your backup set and used it as tape#2. If so you will not be able to do a full restore as much of the backed up data was overwritten.

 

More details on how Retrospect recognizes your tape's name would help sort this out

 

Thanks

Nate