High Technology Posted July 15, 2010 Report Share Posted July 15, 2010 It finally happened -- after all these years of backing up my computer, my C drive finally crashed. I tried a couple of times to restore back to a smaller drive, but remembering the caveat that it won't work for smaller disks (and I don't have a spare 1.5TB drive), I ended up doing a fresh install on my computers original 320GB drive. I have since backed that up too (so I have two alternative restores to choose from). My replacement 1.5TB drive came today, so I installed it, booted up the Emergency Recovery Disc that came with 7.7, and then proceeded to restore everything to the new drive. After the process ran successfully, I rebooted the PC and was greeted with an error that the computer can't boot because a "device is inaccessible". I have a pretty plain vanilla set up -- Intel motherboard and two SATA drives. Looking at the error, it seems fairly common when the changing the configuration in the BIOS from RAID to non-RAID. However, I have had RAID selected in the bios at all times (and get that text screen upon booting that shows my drives to prove it) -- while I don't have RAID set up, I have been contemplating another drive and knew it would be a problem to configure RAID later on. I am now trying to recover by doing a Windows installation and then installing Retrospect and running the restore overnight. I'll be happy if this works, but still a bit dismayed about the Emergency Recovery Disc failing to work since this is the exact situation it is supposed to address. So, can anyone shed some light on why the Emergency Recovery Disc didn't work for me? I assumed since it looks like a Vista/Windows 7 boot, the RAID drivers would be loaded on boot since they are when Vista/7 are installed from a disc -- but is that not the case? Any insight would be appreciated! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
High Technology Posted July 15, 2010 Author Report Share Posted July 15, 2010 Update: I ran the restore from a fresh install of Windows 7 x64 and ran into other problems: I selected a full system restore including the system state, and it ran with no errors. But when I closed Retrospect and rebooted the computer, the good news is that the computer booted fine. However, when I click on my account icon, it almost instantly says "Logging off" and returns me back ot that same log-in screen. Safe mode gets me into Windows, but none of my apps appear to work -- Office 2010 just returns a 5-digit error code, and some other apps that do launch appear to be unregistered or ask for serial numbers. It almost seems to me that something is wrong with the way I backed up my data. It seems to me (as a non-IT expert) that the Registry is not being restored. Perhaps this is an issue with how I backed up my drive -- I backed up the entire C drive, which I presumed would cover everything including the Registry, etc. I don't have a copy of Retrospect running in front of me, but I believe that I selected to back up NT workstation security information and whatever other options made sense for being a total backup of the drive. Reiterating from my post from last night, any insight into this would be greatly appreciated! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndrewA Posted July 15, 2010 Report Share Posted July 15, 2010 If you just ran a backup of the C: drive with the default settings it would have backed up everything you need to do a full system restore. You did do the backup with 7.7 correct? The way the restore works it can not restore all of the system information on the first pass, after the first reboot when it logs in there is a helper service that launches that will finish the restore. Since you can not log in normally, under safe mode try and run the Retrospect helper service under the services control panel. Not sure if it will run in safe mode but it is worth a shot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
High Technology Posted July 17, 2010 Author Report Share Posted July 17, 2010 If you just ran a backup of the C: drive with the default settings it would have backed up everything you need to do a full system restore. You did do the backup with 7.7 correct? The way the restore works it can not restore all of the system information on the first pass, after the first reboot when it logs in there is a helper service that launches that will finish the restore. Since you can not log in normally, under safe mode try and run the Retrospect helper service under the services control panel. Not sure if it will run in safe mode but it is worth a shot. Yes, I ran the backup from 7.7.325 and ran the restore from the same version. I tried to run the Retrospect Launcher from Safe Mode, but it specifically says it won't run in Safe Mode. Now I've done a complete fresh install of Winodws 7, including most of my apps and all of my data. Ran a backup, and made sure that the system state radio button was selected (it was by default). File size was about 90GB. I then wiped the second hard drive, and from within Windows on my C drive I did a full restore to my second hard drive (D Drive). When it told me to reboot I did, but it doesn't look like the helper took over. I did a second reboot, just to be sure, again nothing. I then disconnected my C Drive, and tried to boot off the D drive thinking the helper would launch then. All I got was a text screen saying that Bootmgr.exe was missing. So while not quite the same error as above, clearly the restoration of the Windows 7 partition is not working properly. At this point, I am extremely frustrated. I updated from 7.5 to 7.7 specifically for full Windows 7 support, which clearly isn't working correctly. I've spent hours trying to get it work, to no avail, and have lost all confidence that Retrospect can really fully restore a Windows 7 PC. If anyone from the Retrospect team can jump in with any advice, I'm all ears. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xianfeng Posted July 19, 2010 Report Share Posted July 19, 2010 Hi, Although I am not from Retrospect team, I still want to shed some lights on this. As I observed, for the Win7 emergency recovery, Retrospect CD will ignore the destination you selected. Instead, it will restore the whole image to the oringinal hard disk (I mean the phisical position in BIOS, disk0, disk1...) So in your case, 1. Disconnect your oringinal hard disk first where your old C drive lies on, and then connect the new disk on the SATA point freed from your oringinal disk. 2. In the Restore Wizard, create an temporary empty partition and make it as the destination, then do the restore. Retrospect will wiped the temproary partition away and recreate all partitions, restore all files/foders back. Hope this can help and good luck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
avpman Posted July 19, 2010 Report Share Posted July 19, 2010 I am having the exact same problem with windows 7 except I'm not switching drives. 1) Made complete backup including system state. 2) Wiped drive clean. 3) Booted from 7.7 recover disk. 4) "Prepared" disk 0 by creating a partition. 5) Did a complete restore. System state, etc. 5.5) option to "restore to original location" was greyed out so I selected restore to C drive. 6) Restore finished successfully 7) Upon reboot got msg: "BOOTMGR is missing". PLEASE help. I need to have a viable backup/recovery function ASAP. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndrewA Posted July 19, 2010 Report Share Posted July 19, 2010 Restoring to an empty drive while booted from C: will not work, you need to either restore to the same drive you are booted from, or use the 7.7 DR disc to perform the restore(it will use ASR to recreate the partition but only the DR disc does this, if you do the restore while booted from a different drive the Restore does not prep the disk to be bootable). As for avpman, when you recreated the partition was it the same size or larger than what you backed up? After the restore did you look at the operations log to see if there were any errors during the restore process? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
avpman Posted July 19, 2010 Report Share Posted July 19, 2010 Same exact size drive, as a matter of fact it's even the exact same model drive. I just noticed that the normal three partitions (system/recovery/c) were not created by the restore operation. I thought the 'restore all' was supposed to create the individual partitions (convert my initial partition that I created during the restore operation)? What am I doing wrong? Am I erroring making the backup or something I'm doing during restore? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
High Technology Posted July 21, 2010 Author Report Share Posted July 21, 2010 Well, I gave up as I have been without my apps/data for over two weeks. For the record, I tried the following three options, none of which worked: 1. Boot from Eergency Recovery Disc, new drive on SATA 0 connection, spare drive with backups on SATA 1 connection. Result = No Boot. 2. Fresh Install of Windows 7 on new drive on SATA 0, install Retrospect 7.7.325 and full system restore from spare drive on SATA 1 to target drive on SATA 0 (the original location when backed up). Result = Boots, but appears to not have registry installed. Constantly logging off issue described in my second post above. 3. Fresh install of Windows 7 on new drive, install Retrospect 7.7.325 and did back up to file. Did a full system restore to spare drive on SATA 1. Result = No Boot. I took another 5 hours to reinstall everything from scratch on my new drive and got everything working. Did a backup with another product, and did a full restore to my spare drive on SATA 1. When I switched the restored drive to SATA 0 and rebooted, the computer WORKS FINE. So my conclusion is that Retrospect does not work properly to restore Windows 7 x64 PCs. I am still using Retrospect for data, since its file back up algorithms are hands down the best I've seen. The other product I used is good for the nuts and bolts (i.e., full backup/restore) but the incremental/differential capabilities are "so 10 years ago". ROXIO -- please get these issues sorted out. You bought one of the best backup companies in the business, but the business model won't work if the program can't handle system backups under Windows 7. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
avpman Posted July 21, 2010 Report Share Posted July 21, 2010 I'm curious, what's the "other product" you used for the system restore? I'm also looking for a good bare metal restore app. Like you said, Retro is great for data but sucks at bare metal restore. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
High Technology Posted July 31, 2010 Author Report Share Posted July 31, 2010 I believe that the rules here forbid directly mentioning another product. What I can tell you is that I did expect Retrospect to be to restore a TRUE IMAGE of my Windows 7 HOME Premium computer. It is 2010 after all. Sometimes you need to read between the lines Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
avpman Posted July 31, 2010 Report Share Posted July 31, 2010 (edited) Thank you, I understand the rule. I do not want to have an ACROminous relationship with Retrospect. Edited July 31, 2010 by Guest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dnpeters Posted July 31, 2010 Report Share Posted July 31, 2010 You guys are good! I previously arrived at the same solution. I'd also recommend Mozy (an EMC product) for data. Good luck. - Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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