WinXP to Win7: How to restore data backed up with Save & Restore 2.0 when no S&R CD was created?

My father used Norton Save & Restore 2.0 to back up his documents from his Win XP machine to an external hard drive. The Win XP machine has completely failed so now he's just bought a new one with Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 bit.  However, it turns out Norton Save & Restore 2.0 is not compatible with Win 7 and Norton appears to have no intention of releasing a patch or fix to remedy that (grrr!).

 

I came across this post on the forum which said:

"You should have created a Norton Save & Restore CD when you first installed the software. You can boot to this CD and recover individual files from the recovery environment."

 

This is great if you created a Norton Save & Restore CD.  Unfortunately my father didn't:(.  So please can someone tell me how we can get his files back from his external hard drive? What are his options?  A solution that doesn't involve spending money would be appreciated:). Options I can think of right now are:

 

1) Borrow or download a Norton Save & Restore CD from somewhere else.  Or does it have to be created by the same machine you installed S&R on originally?

2) Get a different Norton product which is Win 7 compatible and CAN read backups created by Norton S&R 2.0.  Is this Ghost 15?

3) Find someone else running Win XP, temporarily install S&R 2 on that, attach his external drive, recover the files to this other machine, then copy the files from that. Pretty tedious!

4) Get some patch/utility/built-in Win 7 feature that can read the files on the external drive.

Try this tool.

http://service1.symantec.com/support/powerquest.nsf/docid/2008040902583362?OpenDocument&lg=en&ct=us&seg=hho&src=hot

 

Run that tool and see if it opens the image for you.

Best of luck,

Dave

Many thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately my father doesn't currently have internet access, as his old modem is also not compatible with Win 7!  But once his new router arrives and is set up he can try this.  Also I'm too far away from him to download this myself.  I'll let you know whether this works in a few days hopefully...

Thanks. That Norton Ghost Image Browser allowed him to browse the Save & Restore images and select files to recover.  Unfortunately some of the MS Word files seem to be corrupted (in all the images I tried).  I found some tips on text recovery at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918429/ and will try to extract more text from them.

I'm glad it worked but sorry to hear some of the word files are corrupted.

If the same files are bad in all the imges, it must have been something to do with the old system.   I hope your able to recover them.

 

I never tried this free tool but it might be worth a shot.

http://www.repairmyword.com/

 

That company makes a very good data recovery program that I use, so I trust that company and never had a problem with there other programs..

Best of luck

Dave

Hi Dave.  Actually I spotted that too after I had sent my last reply.  Yes, Repair My Word did a better job of recovering the text than Word's built-in 'recover text from any file' option.  The latter recovered all the text, including garbage, and also was a lot more tedious to use; whereas I could process and convert all the doc files into rtf files in a single batch with Repair My Word.   Now all my dad's got to do is edit them but I'll let him do that.:)

 

Thanks again for your help and advice.

Glad it worked out for you.

You really should set Dad up with a new backup program when you get a chance, maybe Santa can set him up with Ghost.