In
Steve said:
Can't restore backup. I am trying to help a friend with
his computer. I had him do a full backup of C: to E: which
is a partition. It backed up fine. I even had him restore
a couple of files to make sure it worked. All was well,
then I reformated C: and reinstalled Win XP. Now it will
not restore the files. The file is still on E: but the
filename has changed to just backup.bkf. It is 16 gig a
file. Is there anything I can do to make it restore? Thanks
Steve
If you had him test-restore a couple files and it succeeded, that was the
method you should have used. I assume it's too late now.
If you've reformatted your boot drive, you've lost some of the files that
support that restore from backup.
Did you make the bootable ASR disk during the backup? If so, boot from
that disk and simply follow instructions.
The trick is that, since you booted to drive C, you cannot "restore" to
drive C because it would be yanking things away from you and replacing them,
something that confuses the OS and fails.
So, if you followed all the instructions during the backup of the whole
drive, and have the ASR disk etc., you should be all set. I suspect you
didn't bother, did you?
I haven't done so, but Pegasus' responses sound like they'll work. There are
a lot of ways it might be done but there are even more caveats for most of
them, so I'd try Pegasus' responses if you don't have an ASR disk.
For myself (clients, actually) I have a bootable DVD on which I've built
a minimal installation of XP so I can boot from a drive that's not my boot
drive (C, usually). Then I use ntbackup's Restore and Restore to drive C
(the Restore to 'another location' choice in ntbackup). Don't sweat SP's
until later; you dont need to waste time on them yet.
Never connect to the 'net until you have XP's or better firewall running,
an AV application, and all the SP's up to date. Then connect and update the
rest.
Next time, there is always the possibility of "cloning" the drive to another
drive of like or larger size, too, for problems like this.
Next time, make the ASR disk. You need one for each backup you make, so
always create new ones when you get the opportunity.
Be very, very careful of the drive designations: In some drive C is drive
0, and in others it's drive 1. REad carefully.
HTH,
Twayne`