Dr In 7.7 Questions

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just running some practice DRs so am ready when I need it (just some machines in my house) ... retrospect 7.7.562 on XP SP3

 

so I've create the recovery CD by burning the roxio image dated 1/16/2011. I then try to use that to restore the entire contents of my C drive which is out on the NAS with the catalog file.

 

First challenge is that when I format the empty drive using the recovery CD, it won't let me assign the drive with an active partition .. I can format it, but the active partition is greyed out. I started the restore to that drive ok, but stopped it b/c I wasn't sure whether that drive would actually boot after the restore (which is a long process 285,000 files on 210 gigs). Any suggestions on why the recovery CD won't let me assign the active partition?

 

Second question - my current drive has 3 partitions, with the main partition in the middle (both of the others are small dell recovery partitions).. do I have to format the empty drive to match those partitions exactly in size and directory / file format? or will retrospect be able to restore to a single large partition, slightly larger than the original partition and if I can figure out how to assign that partition as the active partition, should it boot from there? (and I guess I'd deal with the recovery partitions separately).

 

thanks for any input...! just hoping I can do all this before my drive fails ! (no warning signs but it's over 3 years old which seems to be when mine start to fail).

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I had a similar situation with a drive that failed on an older Dell laptop. It was a 20GB drive but only 30GB drives were available. I had the RS Disaster Recovery disk and a full backup of the failed drive.

 

Unfortunately, I was unable to restore a bootable new drive. First I tried using the disaster recovery disk and as I recall that created a 30GB partition. Restoring to that with the Restore Everything option, when I rebooted I received an error that said the drive couldnt boot because of its configuration. I spoke to RS Tech Support and they said if the new drive was formatted to 20GB it would probably work.

 

So I tried that using a WXP OS Disk and set the size to 20GB. Got the same error. Then I tried formatting to the exact size in bytes of all the backup files and that also produced the same error. I wasnt even able to use the XP disk to Repair the OS.

 

I also tried just restoring all the files from my backup rather than using the Restore Everything option. That also didnt work.

 

Eventually, I gave up and just redid my installation from the WXP disk and the Dell drivers, etc.

 

I guess the drive sizes (original and restored) must match in size.

Edited October 6, 2011 by mlehv