Windows 7 Cant get image to restore!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[NickT02LS]

I am so peeved right now it is not even funny. Next time ready for PC I think i will be a mac convert after all this meesed up crap with windows.

Last night when I get home go to start computer and there is a error about missing dll file, then aas I click the error more missing file errors keep coming up, gets progressively worse until PC does not start windows. Ok, that's cool, I have backup and disk image on another drive in computer, no problem right, WRONG!!!

So pop in the windows 7 disk, go to restore disk image, error!!! Got a few errors while trying once I got one when I checked of not to include one of the disk, the one I keep getting is that there is not enough space on drive for restore. Now the disk the image is on is 150 GB, the disk trying to put it on is 500 GB, so why the problem???

So keep searching on my laptop and find a suggestion to do diskpart-clean. Go through every suggestion I found to use diskpart such as clean, =sytem blah blah blah. Still not worky. I install Windows 7 on the drive which works, install backup files and is there. But I want the image to restore. So in the new install I cant get it to do a image restore, so I try from Windows 7 CD again, FAIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now what, ok I have Acronis that I have never used on disk, lets give that a shot.
It starts the procedure from what I can tell, It says something about partition part 4 of 5 while running and counting down the time, at this point it is 1AM and I am goint to bed. Get up this morning and computer still does not boot. The acronis screen was on it's main page before I tried to star computer.

I really feel that windows 7 image backup left me with a false sense of security seeing that it is turning out this difficult. It really should not be, should be able to go through and have it work. This is really horrible, if I do finally get it working somehow I will probably have 10 hours into it, rediculous.

So any other ideas, my last resort is to reinstall windows and my back up files. What I hate with that is then I need to reinstall all my programs, updates ect. and still will be missing my emails that were saved. The image should have everything back to that date.

HELP!!!!!!

Any ideas

 

[patcooke]

Sorrry to hear you long tale of woe. The last thing you need when your system goes belly up is for your backup/restores to fail also (especially when you have had the foresight and good sense to prepare for such events)! Sounds like the only thing you didn't do which could have been useful was to test your backup strategy with a rehearsal.

However, I have to admit I have never been a great fan of the integrated Windows backup and restore which has serious limitations as you have discovered to your cost. I have always relied on Acronis True Image and make a weekly image, maintaining the most recent three. To make this procedure manageable I keep my system partition size to a minimum, using it for only opaerating syste, system files and installed software. I have a substantial number of installed apps and my C drive is using only 32GB. All user data files are stored on a separate data partition which is also used to store the Acronis images. The entire data partition is regularly copied across to an external usb drive. With this setup I can run a full recovery of my entire system partition from the data drive an about 15 minutes, selecting from any one of three images. I can also recover the entire system (system drive and all user data) from the external drive in the case of a complete hard drive failure. I know it doesn't solve your current problem but such a strategy may make you more resilient in the future.

If have never had a problem recovering from an ATI image by booting from the ATI bootable optical disk so am quite surprised that has not solved you problem. (Were you trying to recover from an image you had made or were you trying to create one? From your description of events it sounds like the latter was doomed to fail given that you seem to be suffering from some disk errors).

 

[NickT02LS]

Trying to recover from an image made with Windows 7



My computer has 2 physical hard drives in it, the one I had my operating system on was 500GB partitioned to have a c and d drive. Usually I would install programs on d: and try to leave c: for windows and all that it needs to run with updates. The system image and backup would go to one of the other physical drives. I also make sure I have 2 sign on's set on my computer, but even when I went to the other sign on my errors were appearing. I try to have a plan, but dont plan for the plan not to work

The only thing I am thinking right now is that I may be missing the mbr on the drive because before trying the Acronis I went into the Bios and the drive was not listed. Again I did have at one point windows 7 clean install on it. I am guessing I should format and Partition the drive first maybe and try the acronis again???

 

[patcooke]

I try to have a plan, but dont plan for the plan not to work

Old gits like me who've been in the business since before most people had seen a computer have no such faith in the damn things - all computers are altars to Sod's Law which reigns supreme in this business!

I am guessing I should format and Partition the drive first maybe and try the acronis again???

If you have an Acronis image then re-partioning the drive and reformatting the partition should not be a problem as Acronis executes a partition removal recreates it before executing the image recovery.

 

[NickT02LS]

The image I have saved is the windows 7 image. I am wrong for thinking the acronis software can take that image and restore it??? Or does it need it's own saved image to restore???My acronis version is 2010.

 

[patcooke]

I've not used it but I'm pretty certain there is a tool within the Acronis tools menu to import an image from a vhd (Windows 7) backup file and generate a tib (Acronis backup).

 

[Joe S]

Like Pat I partition my drive and use Acronis, I've still got TI 2010. Something I read at Acronis forums is not to copy or defrag images. I try to keep a few so if there is a problem you can step back a little farther with a different one.
Joe

 

[Saltgrass]

Was the image you have made using the 500 GB drive or one smaller? Windows reimages drives based on the original configuration. Even if you did not back up a partition, any partitioned space is still needed on a new drive.

If it was made on the same drive as you are attempting to restore, you should not get that message. Make sure you are looking at the correct drives.

You can also run a chkdsk for the corruption and an SFC from offline, if you wanted to try that.

 

[NickT02LS]

Ok, so got it going, seems to be ok except a few short cuts such as Microsoft works was not working, no biggie. Anyway what I did when I got home was re install windows 7 then restarted and booted from the Windows 7 disk, tried the restore image again and it worked, Yea!!!! I think though my attempts the drive at last try was not formatted.

Whew, I now installed Acronis and will use that for my back ups and image.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

I use Acronis, it will not open a Widows back up, (I tried), don't put your backups on a drive you defragment, (I did that too) buy an external USB or FireWire drive and put you backups on that, and only turn it on when you are using it to backup or restore (it'll last forever).

If you are like me and have a lot of stuff you just don't want to take any chances on losing, do it twice on two different drives.

I should use off site storage too, I haven't done that yet but I'm thinking about it.

Mike

 

[NickT02LS]

The Acronis software did restore my windows back up and all is good so far. I even saw an option to convert a windows backup to Acronis backup.

I did rear about the defrag thing, so for now that my backup in on a different internal drive I gotta watch my PC pitstop software if it suggest a defrag to that drive. I will be getting a external and doing it there in the near future.

Hi

I use Acronis, it will not open a Widows back up, (I tried), don't put your backups on a drive you defragment, (I did that too) buy an external USB or FireWire drive and put you backups on that, and only turn it on when you are using it to backup or restore (it'll last forever).

If you are like me and have a lot of stuff you just don't want to take any chances on losing, do it twice on two different drives.

I should use off site storage too, I haven't done that yet but I'm thinking about it.

Mike