Brownfield Posted April 26, 2003 Report Share Posted April 26, 2003 If my hard drive dies and I replace it, will disaster recovery still work? I am afraid that the XP Pro from the disaster recovery CD will not write to the new hard drive because it has a different serial number than my original hard drive. It is my understanding that XP will only write to one hard drive. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted April 28, 2003 Report Share Posted April 28, 2003 Disaster Recovery will work with a new hard drive on the same computer. While it's possible that after a full system recovery, you may get a message about new hardware, this is easily resolved by contacting Microsoft. XP may be sensitive to any hardware changes - not just the hard drive. That being said, I have not yet seen a hard drive replacement produce a message from XP. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rjpower Posted May 24, 2003 Report Share Posted May 24, 2003 How about when you install a new, larger hard drive? Would Disaster Recovery work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted May 27, 2003 Report Share Posted May 27, 2003 Disaster Recovery should work - however, it is not guarenteed. Anytime you change hardware, the BIOS, boot.ini or registry may have difficulty resolving the change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rjpower Posted June 1, 2003 Report Share Posted June 1, 2003 Well, barnacles (as SpongeBob would say.) I just upgraded to Retrospect Pro 6.5 in the hopes that it would cleanly assist me in installing a larger 40 GB drive. (My old 10GB drive is too small now.) It appears that ANY changes to hardware will not allow the disaster recovery process to work. I wonder what can happen when my hard drive blows up and I have to put a clean, unformatted drive in. I'll bet that the Disaster Recovery CD won't work then because my new formatting is different. Shucks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted June 1, 2003 Report Share Posted June 1, 2003 These documents may be helpful http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=26984 http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=27794 http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=27679 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rjpower Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 I tried what those links said, but to no avail. Also, Windows XP Pro does not have a boot.ini file as far as I can tell. Retrospect 6.5.283 is supposed to fix that issue anyway. I did try reinstalling Windows XP on the partition, then over-copying the backup onto the partition, but it wiped too much system information when I did that. I guess I'm going to rebuild the new disk and just install data files. What I'm really concerned about is Retrospect's ability to recover from a hard drive crash. I don't like what I'm seeing so far, but I am installing a new hard drive . . . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulvb Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 I have a separate thread with disaster recovery problems, but I have had no difficulty using Retrospect Restore to different hardware. The wonderful stability of XP Pro has given me numerous opportunities to restore :-( I've changed partition sizes, controllers, disks, or video then restored with no problem. I was trying to isolate the problem causing BSODs; eventually I found out that I *must* disable the QoS Packet Scheduler that's part of XP's network code. I've never been able to restore from a recovery CD - either my CD was too old or (the problem I reported yesterday), the CD boot failed part of the way through. But installing XP again, then restoring with retrospect usually works for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 If all you do is replace a hard drive, as far as I know, theree should be no problem unless: 1. Win XP is writing some special codes on the drive. I had heard that Win XP does this, but have never verified the info. You should call MSFT to verify this (and let us know what they say). 2. As is pointed out in the Dantz articles referenced in this thread some vendors used to, or still do, put a system dependent partition on the C drive. They usuall yprovide a utility to restore the magical partition. 3. You reformat the drive with a different number of logical drives, or cause the drive letters to change in a way that affects the OS. For example, if you restore files to a drive, call it G, but it was backed up as drive F, the system will likely not reboot because, at least, %system% would be incorrect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rjpower Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 I think you've answered my question. When I first installed XP on this Dell machine, I neglected to add the S2D (suspend-to-disk) FAT32 partition that is used for this purpose. The docs for the new HDD are quite clear about adding it. Since my old (backed-up) HDD does not have this partition, then that's the explanation for why I can't get the disaster recovery CD to work correctly. It's the mismatch of partitions between the old and new drives that is causing my problem. Now I know that I'll have to build a new drive afresh, but at least I can depend on the disaster recovery procedure if I ever crash my hard drive. Thanks a bunch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 Good! Application.Posting.Rant On:=True My religion discourages me from purchasing systems that have such special drive partitions. I have a Compaq system like that, but never again. One reason I intend to build any future systems myself. Application.Posting.Rant On:=False Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 I own/use several Dells (as well as some home-brew PCs). I've reformatted drives and installed OSes (W2K, XP) from the "metal" (off-the-shelf OS disk, not Dell's special OS version) and used Dell's OS disk with the special partitions. Since my strategy is: 1) Get OS & PC running but don't install much else 2) Install OS (usually XP these days, from "bare metal" OS disk or special vendor OS disk as desired/needed) on 2nd drive (really cheap these days). 3) Ghost (Norton Ghost, Drive Image, etc.) *entire* drive to a *file* on second drive (as single partition, multi-partition, whatever). 4) Reboot from main drive and install other apps, data, etc. 5) Use second drive as destination for Retro backups I don't really have problems with the vendors and weird OS of configs. One partition, multi-partitions, whatever. I "pay" with some extra time and money when setting up a PC but have won big if/when a problem occurs. For a restore I can (BIOS order) boot from the second drive and run either Retro to do a restore *or* Ghost (restores entire drive including multi-partitions) and *then* Retro for more recent restore, all without any manual intervention. And it doesn't rely on Dantz's DR process, keeping the DR CD up-to-date, manually loading odd drivers during DR boot, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 The proble is receiving support if they find we have removed their precious partition. Heck, one vendor won't support their product because I have a dual boot system and was honest enough to tell them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted June 4, 2003 Report Share Posted June 4, 2003 So leave the weird partition (from the vendor, if you reformat & reinstall with their custom CD, etc.). You can still Ghost the whole disk to make the "big" backup and then use RP to just do regular backups of the C: partition (without the little partition). Doing a restore becomes a matter of either using RP to to do a restore (C: partiton only) *or* re-Ghosting the whole drive followed by a RP restore of the C: partition. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djkerber Posted December 4, 2003 Report Share Posted December 4, 2003 I just moved to a new larger drive using Ghost. I had no problems with anything, but Retrospect (6.5 running on XP Professional). The problem is that Retrospect thinks my local C: drive is missing. In a manner of speaking it is, so how do I get Retrospect to 'forget' the old one and see the 'new' one? Re-install Retrospect and rebuild the catalog? Thanks in advance! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted December 4, 2003 Report Share Posted December 4, 2003 Quote: djkerber said: I just moved to a new larger drive using Ghost. I had no problems with anything, but Retrospect (6.5 running on XP Professional). The problem is that Retrospect thinks my local C: drive is missing. In a manner of speaking it is, so how do I get Retrospect to 'forget' the old one and see the 'new' one? Re-install Retrospect and rebuild the catalog? Thanks in advance! One cannot, very easily, move an OS from one drive to another on the same PC, unless the new drive is going to use the drive letter of the old drive. Almost 2 years ago, I got adventurous and decided to "clone" Win 2000 on F drive to the G drive. Getting there was quite painful. It required the use of a registry editor to make ten's of thousands of changes in the registry. And to CAREFULLY make changes in ALL files/shortcuts that contained OS/settings info. Somehow, I got it to work, but I'd never do it again. Better to do a clean install of the OS and the apps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djkerber Posted December 5, 2003 Report Share Posted December 5, 2003 Actually the drive letter is still c:. I am going to reinstall Retrospect and see if that helps and let the forum know the results. Any other advice? Thanks, Dale Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted December 5, 2003 Report Share Posted December 5, 2003 Quote: djkerber said: Actually the drive letter is still c:. I am going to reinstall Retrospect and see if that helps and let the forum know the results. Any other advice? Thanks, Dale If the drive is still C, then everything should still work. Note that Windoze generates "signatures" for drives. Could be those changed and Retrospect is still looking for the old signature. Or maybe Retrospect looks for th ehard drive serial nunmber or the soft volume serial number. If that's the problem, then I would expect that an uninstall and re-install of Retrospect would fix that problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeleblanc Posted December 8, 2003 Report Share Posted December 8, 2003 Just recently I converted my C: drive from FAT32 to NTFS and then reset the volume ID back to the original. Is this what you mean by signature? Anyhow, Rmac 5.1 said the volume was missing. I told it to "forget" it and then reselected it and all was OK! I think I will make a fresh full backup anyway. (BTW, running XP on an old Dell.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted December 9, 2003 Report Share Posted December 9, 2003 Quote: mikeleblanc said: Just recently I converted my C: drive from FAT32 to NTFS and then reset the volume ID back to the original. Is this what you mean by signature? Anyhow, Rmac 5.1 said the volume was missing. I told it to "forget" it and then reselected it and all was OK! I think I will make a fresh full backup anyway. (BTW, running XP on an old Dell.) No, the signature is generated internally by Windows and is included in the Registry. The "Volume ID" is what I refered to as the "soft serial number". I do recall a previous discussion which indicated that Retrospect uses volume identification to identify a volume. I forget whether it is the hard drive serial number, the signature or the soft volume serial number. The latter would be the worst choice as it is too easy for the use to change the soft volume serial number and get in trouble. Uninstalling and re-installing Retrospect would eliminate the problems I mentioned in my previous post as Retrospect would then rebuild its internal drive tables. It would be nice if Dantz stated the facts here so we would not waste time guessing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djkerber Posted December 10, 2003 Report Share Posted December 10, 2003 UPDATE: Reinstalling Retrospect did not work because the de-installtions instructions I found on the Dantz website did not tell all. There is a directory in the All Users\Local Settings folder that contains a bundh of Retorspect files. :-| Anyway, all I need to do was to forget the volume, re-add the 'new' volume to the script and everything works as it has. Dale Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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