Restore Entire Volume - Registry and Programs

[Guest]

I had to reinstall XP Home and repartition my hard drive, so I thought that I'd lost everything that was on the drive--including logical partitions set up by Partition Magic. At one point when reinstalling I realized that it was installing XP to my firewire drive and not my desktop, so I did another reinstall. When I finally got the system working, I did an entire restore "C" disk from my firewire hard drive. Now I not only have two boot-up choices (have to edit boot.ini), but I have a zillion disks (fixed and removable) from "A" to "I." All of the progras and data that were on my original "C" disk are now also on "D."

 

My questions:

 

1. Is it possible that when I "restored" to "C" from my backup set, that the information went to a sub-folder "D" instead. What I'm trying to accomplish is to get my system back exactly as it was on Sunday, April 4, 2004.

 

2. The registry on Sunday was huge with all of the programs that I have on my disk--the new registry is "bare bones." I've followed the instructions to copy the registry from the backup file to my "C" disk, but it doesn't seem to be working. I still have the "bare bones" registry.

 

3. And finally, all of the programs that were registered in "Add/Remove" are gone! Wouldn't a full restore also restore those entries? I don't want to have to reload all of my programs and, in some instances can't as I no longer have the shareware/update files. Also, I have about 50 MS Update files in WINNT. Will I now have to go into MS XP Update site and re-download all of the updates?

 

Am I doing something wrong here?

 

Thank you.