Product questions: No Outlook or SQL recovery

[k1200st58]

Hi Everyone, sorry in advance for length of this post!

 

I lost 1 of 2 drives on RAID 0 and obviously my system tanked. I've replaced with 4 drives on RAID 0+1 and don't want to ever go through this again.

 

Fortunately, I did an entire drive backup 2 weeks before I lost the drive. Needless to say, I was extremely nervous about going through Retrospect's process since it was untested for me.

 

First issue is I was able to use the manufacturer's CD (btw, they used Ghost) and got the system back to where it was when I bought it 1.5 years ago.

 

In Retrospect, I was unable to point to the catalog, as it was lost. The videos on the website are great, and I finally figured out that I could re-create it. That process took 2 hours for 130 GB--not bad.

 

With the catalog back in place, I began the restore. It freaked me out a little that it just did it without creating a boot CD like Ghost does. I couldn't imagine how Retrospect could handle concurrency and other issues. However, after about 2.5 hours it was completed.

 

My first scare came when I was prompted towards the latter part of the restore to insert the Windows XP sp2 CD because a file had been changed. I think I correctly summarized that in the end, Retrospect knew what it was doing and that maybe it was a timing problem. I cancelled this prompt and took the plunge on the reboot. Did I do the right thing?

 

Second scare, I got a blue screen on the first reboot. After rebooting again in Safe Mode, letting the system come up, poking around a little bit, I then exited and rebooted again.

 

I was relieved to get to a password prompt...and when the system finished booting, my desktop was remarkably intact. Icons had their respective logos and it was positioned the way I like to arrange them.

 

I began to verify the integrity of the system. Word, Excel, MS Visual Studio, Fireworks came up without a hitch. Wow!

 

However, I noticed two things that are wrong and that leads to my issues:

 

1. MS Outlook is prompting me for the outlook.pst file. I cannot located it, nor can I do a catalog scan in the backup set. Am I totally hosed on this issue? Does Retrospect not handle even a basic file backup of the PST file? What do I need to do to get past this prompt? Outlook will not come up without a PST file???

 

2. SQL Server 2005 Express (part of MS Visual Studio) is not working although the database files are located in the directlry. I subsequently discovered that I am unable to start the SQL Server service. I'm getting a 17113 error in the event log. Again, am I hosed on this or has anyone run into this issue before? Do I just re-install MS Visual Studio and SQL Express 2005?

 

3. Are there any other things I need to be concerned about? I'm still checking the integrity of all my applications, etc. Some helpful hints (or point me to a KB article) would be greatly appreciated.

 

I'm beginning to see that the Retrospect Express version I got with my Western Digital external backup drive is not able to handle the full range of services I need. Does the Retrospect Pro version handle Outlook (client) and SQL Server 2005 (Express)?

 

Despite these issues, I couldn't believe how smoothly and quickly Retrospect worked. I am very impressed with the training tutorials on the site as well.

 

Thanks for your help,

Scott