Multiple failures of 7.7 recovery CD which can make it useless

[gsevart]

I appear to have uncovered a variety of problems with the new recovery CD introduced with 7.7. It is certainly a good idea and a step in the right direction, but it has essentially made disaster recovery impossible for nearly all machines on my network as I have discovered today.

 

My problems:

1) The "restore as client" screen doesn't work properly. It just displays "127.0.0.1" as the machine's IP address. That isn't very helpful.

 

2) The recovery mode doesn't appear to be able to load XP or 2K drivers, at least for storage controllers.

 

That second problem is even more troubling than the first since Retrospect claims to support clients ranging back to Windows 2000. If there's no way to restore a 2K box using 2K drivers using a storage controller for which Vista drivers do not exist, there's either a technical or advertising problem since the feature sets don't match up.

[Xianfeng]

For issue #1, do you have DHCP server in your LAN?

 

For issue #2, have you tried the "Load driver for network card..." to install the driver of your machine?

[gsevart]

Yes, we do have a DHCP server in our environment. I did try loading the Ethernet driver manually just in case support for it wasn't included out of the box, but that did not appear to improve the situation.

 

I even loaded the driver and tried not proceeding to the next step where the Retrospect client is launched for a while so as to give it time to acquire an address.

 

Is there anything else that can cause it?

 

Take note that issue number two is regarding storage controllers, not NICs. I was unable to load a device driver for the RAID controller the machine boots from--an old Promise SX4000. Drivers exist for it for Windows 2000 and XP, but not for later operating systems. The drivers failed to load in the WinPE environment and produced an error instead. They do work fine with an actual copy of Windows 2000, however.

Edited May 7, 2010 by Guest

[Xianfeng]

For the issue #1, I didn't meet the issue before.

how many NICs in your machine?

Have your tried other machines inside your LAN to see if they can get IP address?

 

For the issue #2, I understand your issue now.

Since you don't have a WinPE driver file for the storage device, you can't do local Recovery.

What I can imagine is that if issue #1 can be resolved, you can use another machine running Retrospect to connect to it and do remote Recovery. So issue #1 is the key.

[gsevart]

Ultimately, I did have to end up doing a regular recovery. Since the original disk had failed, I had to reinstall Windows 2000 normally, install Retrospect, register the new client, and then restore the old client's backup session to the new instance of the same machine. That did work fine, albeit inconvenient and time consuming. I'd have preferred for the fancy new recovery disc to work.

Edited May 12, 2010 by Guest

[CyberPaladin]

I am running into the same problem described as "issue #1" in this thread. When using the 7.7 Emergency Recovery CD, the IP address defaults to the loopback address 127.0.0.1. Is there a way within the recovery environment to assign a static IP address to one of the NICs?

[rhwalker]

Perhaps the following thread would help:

Disaster Recovery CD with static IP

 

Russ

[CyberPaladin]

Thanks Russ. Since my posting the other day, I have experimented with modifying startnet.cmd to allow access to the Windows PE command prompt and used NETSH to assign an IP address, which is exactly what Jeff suggested in the posting you referenced. So, I guess great minds think alike ;-) I have to agree with labrat that not providing a means to specify a static ip address makes the "out of the box" emergency recovery cd useless for anyone who does not use DHCP. Hopefully this issue will be addressed soon so "workarounds" are not required.