I have Windows Vista 64 Bit installed on a RAID 10 boot drive(s). Every night, I have Norton Save and Restore 2.0 make a system backup of the c:\ drive to an external USB drive.
Yesterday, I had a catastrophic failure. My system locked up, and I had to do a hard reboot. After this, it was clear that Windows was not in a right state of mind.
I figured...no big deal. I'll just restore the previous night's backup.
I popped in my custom Save and Restore boot disc and restart the system. It detects my backup on the USB drive. I select the option to view the contents of the backup...everything looks like it's there. So, I choose the option to restore my system. Save and Restore proceeds to verify the image, and everything looks good. It then begins to restore the drive. Completes successfully.
After a restart, I eventually get to a flashing cursor (after all the BIOS stuff). Windows will not start.
I pop the Save and Restore boot disc back in, and after a reboot, it tells me:
DlMapper.exe - Corrupt file
The file or directory c:\Windows is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chdsk utility.
This utility runs all day long, and is not making much progress.
Any and all suggestions are appreciated. Am I missing something obvious here?
So...reading the forums, it appears Save and Restore 2.0 does not support software RAIDs. However, I've been making incremental backups of my RAID10 boot drive every night for the past month.
Does SaR 2.0 make clean backups of RAID environments (even if it can't restore it)? I've done some brief testing by moving my external USB drive to my laptop, and it looks like some files were backed up cleanly, and some files are corrupt.
The reason I'm asking is I'm willing to restore Vista 64 manually...I just need to know I can extract my files from the recovery points.
Yes S&R should backup software RAID properly, as you've seen the incompatability comes when booting up to the recovery environment and trying to perform a restore. I have heard that if you recreate the software RAID container from withing WINPE (which is what the S&R recovery CD is built on) using Diskpart that you may be able to successfully recover your backup on top of it. I've never done this myself so I can't really give you any pointers. If this works you should have a fully restored (bootable) system.
Baring that you can as you've said reinstall Vista and restore your data from the images from within Windows. You would use the recovery point browser application to do this. You could also do it from the Recovery CD as you can launch the Recovery Point Browser from the CD as well.
I have reinstalled Vista. Using the recovery point browser, I am able to browse through all my nightly backups on my external USB drive. Unfortunately, there is random corruption throughout each recovery point.
For example, I added a folder of vacation pictures to my desktop a week ago. In each recovery point, a random set of pictures is corrupt. The pictures were originally fine - I was looking at them every day.
How can SaR let this happen? How is this even possible? I don't know what to do now. I thought the point of a backup is to give you peace of mind. :(
It's possible that one of the increments has become corrupted, which means any increment after that would be invalid. You can backtrack through the increments until you find the first one without corruption. You may want to check to see if the base is corrupt first. Base images end with .v2i, incrementals end with .iv2i
Corruption of an image usually occurs if a sector the image is sitting on goes bad, or if an outside source (poorly designed application or a virus) damages the file.
Also if you manually move the images around you need ot make sure you copy all of the files (base and all of it's increments) for the same reason stated above, if you miss coping one of the increments all of the increments after that are invalid as they build on each other.
Did you only have one base set or did you have it configured to keep more than one image set. If so you could also check one of the older image sets.
I understand how you feel, losing data is much more than an inconvenience. Have you run a live update on Save & Restore? We have in the past had instances with certain data structures that would give image explorer some issues on restoring files. A live update would ensure your using the current Image Browser. If you’ve mounted the image and verified it and it comes up clean, this indicates to me that this is likely the case here. You could always mount the image again and use a simple file copy from within Windows and your mounted volume to recover files if this were the case and they shouldn’t be in a corrupted state. The same is true about restoring the image to an empty data volume. The only experience I’ve seen with data corruption is with older versions of Image Explorer. In this case the files themselves aren’t actually corrupted, Image Explorer just wasn’t restoring them properly.