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Disaster Recovery Failure (how do I avoid it in the future)


disteinborn

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I recently needed to rebuild my system. That system has two physical disk drives partitioned into three logical drives. It runs Windows XP, SP1 (the original Windows CD is XP, not SP1). I did a full system backup and created a fresh DR CD.

 

I then repartitioned my drives and formatted the new partitions. The arrangement of the partitions was different. However, each new partition is large enough to hold all of the data that resides in that partition with ample free space. I then ran the DR CD. DR seemed to work correctly. It installed the temporary OS, rebooted and then allowed me to restore all three partitions (the boot partition, a separate partition for all applications software and a separate partition for data). After the restore process was completed, my system rebooted. It then froze (displaying the Windows XP logo on a blue background).

 

When I rebooted to the command console to try to recover, I could see that both the temporary OS and the restored OS were still on the boot drive. I was never able to get past this point; that is, I was never able to remove the temporary OS and complete the final boot.

 

I finally simply did a clean installation of Windows XP and all of my applications software and that worked.

 

So my question for the Dantz Software folks is what went wrong and how do I avoid it (in Retrospect 6.0 for Windows)

 

Thanks!! confused.gif

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Are these IDE or SCSI drives? Do you have a RAID or any non-standard hardware? What kind of devices are attached? What is the make/model of the computer? Were any physical hardware changes made before the DR (not including format/partition of drivers)?

 

Rather then booting into the console, did you attempt another boot of the computer? Did it repeatedly hang?

 

Did you try DR from another snapshot or backup set?

 

From your post, it doesn't appear that you did anything 'wrong' however, why it didn't work is not obvious either.

 

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Thank you for your reply. I will answer your questions in order.

 

First, both of the disk drives are SCSI drives connected to an Adaptec 19160 host adapter. The only other device on the host adapter (on a different SCSI path) is a DVD player.

 

I had made no hardware changes before doing the restore (I did the full system backup, created the DR CD, formatted the drives and then attempted to restore the system.

 

I tried rebooting a few times. Each time the system locked displaying the Windows XP logo on a light blue background.

 

I did not have any other DR sets to use for a recovery so I had no other system backup set (that includes the boot partition and the applications partition) that I could use for a full restore of the OS and applications software.

 

Thanks for your help!

 

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