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Restore Vista without disaster recovery disk?


martin.stone

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Help!!

 

I had to rebuild my RAID 0 array, losing all data, and initially I wasn't concerned as I had a complete backup ready and waiting.

 

I reinstalled Vista, then ran system restore (as I have lost Disaster Recovery disk :angry2: ) and left it chugging overnight. It rebooted into Vista and reported Authentication failure etc etc. Despite all efforts, will not boot at all now!!

 

I short, how can I reliably restore Vista without the Disaster Recovery disk?

 

I should mention I'm using latest revision of Retrospect Express 7.5 and just downloaded 7.6 to install come the time......

 

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Robin,

 

Many, many thanks - that's probably where things are going wrong :rollie: ... Won't know for some time as it's taking about 8hrs to restore after install....

 

I'm pretty sure I had Vista Home Premium SP1 installed - any idea where I can check this on the backup set (is there a file I can look at that will confirm)?

 

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Well, eventually got there...

 

Reinstalled Vista SP1 and all available updates as instructed which, from memory, was the state of play on last backup 50/10/08.

 

On first reboot after restore next morning, got the popup message from Retrospect Express on Lista login saying "system has been restored by Retrospect - please reboot"...

 

...On reboot, got the dreaded black and white text only message message (Vista's version of the blue-screen error, no doubt) to the effect "cannot find winstart.exe" or "winload.exe" or similar (didn't write it down, sorry).

 

Carried out Repair using Vista DVD Install disk. Twice.

 

System then said "unauthorised changes have been made - you need to re-validate. You will only have limited functionality of Vista". It would not revalidate on the website it referred to but after a couple of minutes a pop-up said "reboot now for changes to take effect". I don't know what changes, I didn't make any...?

 

On reboot, all seemed well, normal screen back etc etc. I did another reboot to make sure.... then it said that I needed to re-enter the Product Key...

 

Did that and now seems to be okay... I hope!!!

 

Whay is Vista such a pain to restore?

 

Is there not an easier way than this? Is there anything that can be changed on the Retrospect side of things to make life a little easier? Let's just say, 99% on people out there would not have been able to do this without assistance from someone who knew their way arond computers...

 

Anyway, many thanks for your help.... :thanks:

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I had problems with the SATA drivers so having to re-install AGAIN!!!!! Hopefully tomorrow all will be well again.... or sane, at least!!!

 

Does anyone know if the boffins at EMC are working on making the restoration of a Vista system using Retrospect (Express) more streamlined/user friendly?

 

At present, for me to to carry out a Disaster Recovery on my system I have to re-install XP, then upgrade to Vista then further upgrade to Vista SP1 then install all the Security Updates up until the point of the last backup...

 

The main problem with this (apart from the time/inconvenience of reinstalling from stratch) is that it's impossible to see what Security Updates have, or have not, been installed on the backup set...

 

Surely between EMC/Dantz and Micro$oft an easier way of accomplishing a DR could be found...?

 

Comments, anyone?

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