Complete PC Backup can't find any OS when trying to restore

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Guest

System: Vista Business x64

I tried to restore after a program I had installed crashed, just to clean
up post-uninstall debris. I booted to my Vista Install DVD from my hard
drive. When I get to the dialog to choose a system partition, none are
displayed! But my system boots just fine. I like to make backups before
making important changes, so this worries me. The Complete PC Backup would be
so handy.
Thanks
 
Hi,

I'm unclear on what you're stating. If you are looking to create a complete
PC backup, that is done from within Vista not by booting the disk. If you
are booting the disk to invoke a restoration of a previously created backup,
then it would not be on the system volume, it would be wherever you saved it
(it's not possible to save a complete backup to the designated system or
boot volumes). Your system as well may require the installation of a 64-bit
driver to support recognition of the drive from the booted disk.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
Sorry I was unclear. I'm trying to restore a Complete PC Backup that I had
already made (successfully) while in Vista (64-bit). In fact, I have made
several such backups, so making the backups is not the problem. I know the
backup is not on the system disk.
The problem is that my system disk is not found when I try to restore
when booting from the DVD: at the step where I am supposed to select the
operating system I want to repair (right after choosing the language) there
is nothing in the selection box. When I go to a command prompt, I can find
my hard drives by testing with "dir X:" using various values of X. My backups
are on a separate drive from my system disk.

I had trouble with installation as well with my system disks being
recognized. I have 3 SATA drives and an external USB. One of the drives had
XP Pro (32-bit) on it.
I was trying to install Vista (64-bit) to one of the other drives, but the
installation disk wouldn't recognize any partition as being acceptable for
installation--not even when I had deleted all partitions that were on that
disk, rebooted, and then repartitioned during the install. At first I had
solved this by setting the partition on the Vista target disk to active while
in XP. That worked and Vista installed, but then I had problems seeing my
other disks (not just the XP system disk). I noticed that some others had
similar problems while I was searching for a workaround.

Finally, and what worked, I removed all drives except the target drive and
installed with no problem. Then I had to boot into another system and
reformat the drives I wanted to use with Vista, and reinstall my data from
that. I gave up on dual booting with XP. Obviously, the difficulty I had
installing is related to the problem I am having with restore.

Perhaps I could do this with a command-line version of Complete PC Backup?
Is the executable named 'cpbackup.exe'? I could also remove my internal disks
and just have the Vista system disk and my external USB backup disk
connected. I would prefer not to have to keep removing and reconnecting my
internal drives though.

Thanks
 
Some SATA Disk is not recogniced from Boot.
Chek your bios to desactivate some special options for SATA Drivers.
The best software in this case is ACRONIS for Backup (no problem for special
SATA With Cache Drivers on Boot).

Sorry for my english. Speek spanish.
Regards, Mauro.
 
I agree with you...I'm going to go back to my disk imaging software. Too
bad. The Complete PC Backup would have been much faster, but reliability is
king with backups! My BIOS settings should be fine (good suggestion though)
as my drives are recognized by XP Pro, Solaris, OpenBSD, SUSE Linux, even
Plan 9 from Bell Labs! And by Vista once it gets installed. It seems to be
just the installer DVD (and it messes with my BIOS in bad ways
too--fortunately cleared by booting to some other OS).

Thanks for your reply
 
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