mikeh Posted February 23, 2005 Report Share Posted February 23, 2005 Hi, I'm just upgrading my PC. What I want to be able to do is backup everyting on my current machine and restore to the new one. The new one has different procesor (P4) to the old one (AMD Athlone), both are XP SP2. I will be putting the second hard disk from the old one into the new one. Is this a sensible thing to try with Retrospect? Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted February 23, 2005 Report Share Posted February 23, 2005 You would be better off conecting the systems via a network. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeh Posted February 23, 2005 Author Report Share Posted February 23, 2005 I was hoping to avoid having to reinstall all the software, but having thought about it a bit more it may be better to start again from scratch -and be a bit selective about what I replicate on the news system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted February 24, 2005 Report Share Posted February 24, 2005 Quote: I was hoping to avoid having to reinstall all the software, but having thought about it a bit more it may be better to start again from scratch -and be a bit selective about what I replicate on the news system. Transferring a system from one PC to another has nothing to do with Retrospect. Retrospect would just be the transfer mechanism. There are articles in various places about how to move a system to another PC, but you gotta be careful. I'd recommend just re-installing everything, you'll get a cleaner system. I once got carried away and cloned an OS from one drive to another on the same system. It worked, and I learned a lot, but it was a foolish venture that I would never again do nor recommend to anyone. I later created another OS by starting from scratch, it's a lot easier that way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted February 24, 2005 Report Share Posted February 24, 2005 I agree with Howard. I don't even upgrade from one OS to another on the same PC--a clean new install of an OS and apps (after a reformat) works out better in the long run. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeh Posted February 24, 2005 Author Report Share Posted February 24, 2005 Thanks for your comments. I'll start form scratch. The System I have now started life as WNNT4.0 and its been through several changes of hard drive and motherboard and through W2K to WXP. It's time for a clean set up Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaHen Posted February 24, 2005 Report Share Posted February 24, 2005 My hard drive failed last month and I decided to do a reinstall of WinXP. In fact, I did it five times. First few times I brought files over from my backup incorrectly. After that was straightened out, I reinstalled a few more time just for the experience and learning. With the complete reinstall, I now have a clean system without all the cob-webs as well as leaving out many programs that I had seldom used. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted February 24, 2005 Report Share Posted February 24, 2005 Quote: My hard drive failed last month and I decided to do a reinstall of WinXP. In fact, I did it five times. First few times I brought files over from my backup incorrectly. After that was straightened out, I reinstalled a few more time just for the experience and learning. With the complete reinstall, I now have a clean system without all the cob-webs as well as leaving out many programs that I had seldom used. If misery loves company, I too had a hard drive fail last month, In my case, there are 3 hard drives with 4 OS: Drive 0: C-D Drive 1: F-H Drive 2: I-M OSes on C, F, G and J, each witgh a different version of MSFT Office. Retrospect runs in the OS on the J drive. It was Drive 2 that failed. Due to difficulties installing the replacement drive (don't ask!!), I also had to Fdisk Drive 0. I restored the drives from a backup that was completed less than a few hours before the drive died. For unknown reasons, I had to then: 1. Run Detect and Repair on the Offices in the G and J drives. 2. Re-install Office on the C drive. If Retrospect really does restore files, then there's no excuse for this. A true backup program would allow the following: a. Perforfm a backup. b. Delete all the files on one, or more, drives. c. Restore the drives And one should end up from whence one started. Why does this not occur? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cajun100 Posted February 27, 2005 Report Share Posted February 27, 2005 Howard, I worry about this a lot, with similar multiple partitions and software installs on four machines in my home/family office. May I ask a couple of clarifying questions? 1. Was Drive J also the location for the Retrospect catalog files? Or were these located on Drive C? Depends on which OS you were running when you installed Retrospect, I believe. Do you have different OS installed on each of your mentioned partitions? Same OS, or different (Linux, Win98, Win2000, WinXP, etc.)? 2. When you "lost" Drive J (as part of HD#2), and then had to fdisk Drive #1, did you not then lose all Retrospect catalog files on your PC? 3. Were you unable to "recover" the catalog files from the external HD with the Retrospect backup files? I assume you did NOT have the problem of external HD identification after the fdisk routine (that pops up here from time to time)? If you WERE able to recover as in #3, I believe that your entire inventory of OS files and program files should have been accessible after using Retrospect to restore to the new HD ... however, I find that MS Office (esp after Office97) with its use of various files in "Program Files/Common" and in "Documents & Settings/Applications/Microsoft" etc. is very hard to "restore" without a re-install to get all the references correct again. To make clear: was MSOffice the ONLY application that had to be "repaired" or reinstalled after all your adjustments? If that is true, in my own case I would certainly feel fortunate to have this much backup restored without a major hitch. I mean, I would gladly reinstall MSOffice alone if that were the only remaining problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted February 28, 2005 Report Share Posted February 28, 2005 Quote: Howard, I worry about this a lot, with similar multiple partitions and software installs on four machines in my home/family office. May I ask a couple of clarifying questions? 1. Was Drive J also the location for the Retrospect catalog files? Or were these located on Drive C? Depends on which OS you were running when you installed Retrospect, I believe. Do you have different OS installed on each of your mentioned partitions? Same OS, or different (Linux, Win98, Win2000, WinXP, etc.)? Catalog files were on drive I, but that is the same sphysical drive, so catalog was lost. Took just vunder 7 hours to rebuild the catalofg during the DR. I have since then moved the catalog to a different physical drive, so if I lose the drive that has Retrospect, I can at least save the catalog. But there are no guarantees, any drive(s) can die at any time. I used to backp th caralogs to CD-RW, but have not done that for some time. The OS are not relevant. As far as Retrospect is concerned, it knows only about the OS in which it is installed, the others are treated as ordinary files. Quote: 2. When you "lost" Drive J (as part of HD#2), and then had to fdisk Drive #1, did you not then lose all Retrospect catalog files on your PC? Drive 0, not drive 1, was fdisked. The OS on J is entirely on J, the other drives are not relevant. Some o the programs installed in J are actually on D (on drive 0), Quote: 3. Were you unable to "recover" the catalog files from the external HD with the Retrospect backup files? There are no catalog files on backup media when using a disk backup set, Quote: I assume you did NOT have the problem of external HD identification after the fdisk routine (that pops up here from time to time)? You assumed wrong. An fdisk will result in that problem. Quote: If you WERE able to recover as in #3, I believe that your entire inventory of OS files and program files should have been accessible after using Retrospect to restore to the new HD ... Allegedly, Retrospect restores all files. [quote[however, I find that MS Office (esp after Office97) with its use of various files in "Program Files/Common" and in "Documents & Settings/Applications/Microsoft" etc. is very hard to "restore" without a re-install to get all the references correct again. That's a red herring and not true. Quote: To make clear: was MSOffice the ONLY application that had to be "repaired" or reinstalled after all your adjustments? Yes, but I had to fix some things on the other OS and NAV had to be reactivated. As the system is multiboot, I was able to boot to an OS on drive 1, but, in its infinite wisdom, that OS detected that there were now unresolved shortcuts, etc. due to the missing drive 2 and I had to manually restore those, as well as use Norton Utilities' WinDoctor to fix many registry entries. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cajun100 Posted March 1, 2005 Report Share Posted March 1, 2005 Not very reassuring. Perhaps the thing I am most concerned with: are you finding that restoring from a DR disk to a new, clean, formattted drive does not work well? Does FDISK set up the disk in such a way that the Retrospect DR disk does not "see" the HD as it did before? This is confusing me a great deal ... I am certainly not going to experiment on a running, needed machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted March 1, 2005 Report Share Posted March 1, 2005 Quote: Not very reassuring. Perhaps the thing I am most concerned with: are you finding that restoring from a DR disk to a new, clean, formattted drive does not work well? Does FDISK set up the disk in such a way that the Retrospect DR disk does not "see" the HD as it did before? This is confusing me a great deal ... I am certainly not going to experiment on a running, needed machine. When you do an FDisk or replaxe a hard drive, Retrispect treats the drive as a new drive. THe effect is to have twp deives with the same name. So when I replaced Drive 2, Retrospect thought that I had new NameI, NameJ, NameK, NameL and NameM drives AND still retained references to te same names for the previous hard drives. For each such drive, this shows up as two entries with the same name, however, 1 entry is dimmed and te other isn't. So you just need to choose the non-dimmed entries. And you neeed to go into Configure Volumes abd delete the dimmed volme names, then edit any scripts to add in the non dimmed volumes. This occurs because, I must ASSuME, that Retrospect is using either the drive signature (generated by windoze (wgich you can find in the registry) and.or the actual drive serial number. Both likely change when a drive is replaced or Fdisked. Although it is a pain the arse, for us, I hate to admit it, but Retrospect is correct in treating such drives as having changed. However, they need to improve their documentation and cleatly describe what to do in such situations. I hereby announce my retirement from this thread. Bye bye! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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