I have S & R 2.0 which came pre-installed on my Dell Inspiron 530s along with Vista Home Premium (32 bit). I have been having some driver problems with some devices on my system and decided to do a restore of “My Computer” to go back to my last back-up when the system was working properly.
I used S & R to put the system in “Recovery Mode” to begin to recover the “C:” drive. It never got very far. It got to the point where it said:
“Recover My Computer Wizard – Progress = 0%”
“Calculating Time Remaining”
“Verifying Image Integrity”
“Validating Image Data”
The recovery never moved past that point. After 2 hours, the message hadn’t changed at all and nothing seemed to be happening. I exercised the “Cancel” option and got a message saying “If you cancel now, the target drive will not be formatted. Do you really want to cancel”.
After getting that message, I gave it another chance and let it continue once more. After another full hour, the same message still appeared and the restore had still obviously not begun.
I did a full cancel this time and rebooted my system (which thankfully hadn’t been erased) and got Vista re-loaded successfully. I did a “Chkdsk” and it found no disk errors.
So…can anyone here tell me what happened and why I couldn’t do a “Restore” with “S & R”. All of the backups I had made indicated there was no problems with them and the restore process in Norton began with no problems indicated other than the “hang” I have already described. I have no idea why this wouldn’t work. Right now, I feel as if I have no protection in case my system gets worse and I have to do a restore.
Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
What sort of driver problem where you noticing? What symptoms where you experiencing? Where is the backup that you are restoring from located? Is it an external drive? Internal drive? Same drive? CD/DVD?
Thanks for the response. My system is a Dell Inspiron with 2 250 GB internal hard drives in “DataSafe” Raid formation so that I have a second hard drive as hardware backup for the other. Dell has pre-installed “Norton S & R” to use the “D:” partition on the “DataSafe” internal drive pair for backup files “in compressed format”.
Since the backup files on my system had become so large (because the number and size of the data files on the “C:” drive has been consistently growing), the backup files now produced by S & R had become so large that they were too big for the “D:” drive (or partition). For this reason, I had added a 500 GB external USB hard drive for extra backup space (the “K:” drive) and had pointed “S & R” to the “K:” drive for backup files instead of the “D:” drive.
The “K:” drive has now been setup on my system and in “S & R” as the location that contains my backup files and that is the location I was attempting to restore from.
When the problems I had described in my first post occurred, I had experienced a general power failure on my entire system because of a local power system problem (not a storm). I had a surge protector and nothing on the system appeared to have been damaged (diagnostics ran fine, “chkdsk” ran fine, etc).
When I attempted to restart the system to load Vista however, I got a message saying that the system couldn’t start up and after several tries got another message saying that the system “could not repair itself” automatically. It provided some diagnostic information that included a message saying that there was a “bad driver” and listed the USB printer driver. It told me unplug the device and attempt to restart, which I did.
The restart was successful and Vista loaded normally at that point. Since I had had the aforementioned problems, I decided I had better restore “my system” to its previous working level and attempted to do so. When I started “S & R” and attempted to “restore”, it told me the system had to be shutdown and placed in “recovery mode” in order to do that.
I did the shutdown and “S & R” attempted to do the restore from that point, as described in my original post and that’s were “S & R” went into the ”hang” that I mentioned. I finally gave up on the “restore” attempt because of those problems. Since that time, my system has been working fine so it has turned out that I didn’t need to do a “restore” at that time (apparently).
I am somewhat uncomfortable however in that my only attempt at an emergency ”restore” of my system has not been successful. At this point, I am not confident that it would succeed if I needed to do a “restore” in a future emergency. In fact, I plan to add a second 500 GB external Hard drive to keep another copy of my backup data on a second, independent location. I am waiting to get this problem resolved before i do that however.
Open the recovery point browser and ensure that you can view the data in the backup. Since you mentioned a power problem we would want to make sure that the reason for the failure wasn't due to some sort of data corruption problem (chkdsk will check the sectors and not the actual data).
I'd reboot to the recovery environment and just try using some of the tools there. Make sure they launch, etc. It sounds like the driver problem you encountered would fit the driver being corrupted by the power event you mentioned. I would be concerned that a file may have been corrupted on the recovery environment (I'm assuming you're using the one that is on the hard drive itself and via the boot menu).