Disaster CD can't see my USB hard drive

[Jlneufeld]

I'm using Retrospect Professinal 6.0 on a XP Home machine with all OS updates. I use a Maxtor 120 G USB 2.0 hard drive as my backup device. A SMART error message from my machine's primary hard drive let me know that it would need replacing. I created a disaster recovery CD the day the machine's hard drive was replaced.

 

The disaster recovery CD booted fine and let me choose whether I wanted to install the OS on the USB hard drive I was using for backup (no) or the new hard drive (after full formatting).

 

Once the OS was installed, the machine booted fine and Retrospect began running. But it couldn't see the USB drive! I couldn't even find it from a command line. If I used my reinstallation CD to reinstall the full original OS, I could see the USB drive without any difficulty. I switched back and forth between the Disaster Recovery CD and the original OS Reinstallation CD several times. Every time the same--the OS installed by Disaster recovery could not see the USB hard drive but the OS installed from the reinstallation CD could.

 

With the reinstallation CD's OS installed I started Retrospect and pointed it to the snapshot on the disaster recovery CD. It is still running (after 14 hours) and seems to be restoring files. I hope when it finishes my computer acts like it did before the new disk was installed.

 

I am puzzled and disappointed at the inability of the OS installed by the Disaster Recovery CD to be able to see my backup device. I had hoped and expected everthing to be automatic, and it was far from that. Furthermore, there was no way in advance I could have known that the OS installed by the Disaster Recovery CD would have this serious limitation.

 

This appears to be a (nasty) bug in Retrospect. Is there a way to make the Disaster Recovery CDs work correctly?

[AmyJ]

If you boot from the Disaster Recovery CD and Retrospect or Windows is unable to see a backup device, hard disk or RAID configuration, it could be that the system is missing important drivers.

 

When booting from the Disaster Recovery CD, you will get a chance to add custom device drivers by pressing F6.

 

If you do miss this step when booting from the CD, reboot from the DR CD and add any additional drivers that are needed to access backup devices or RAID volumes.

 

When you created the DR CD, when prompted did you use the I386 folder from your hard drive or from your Windows installer CD?