cancelling restore leads to trouble

This evening, after having made undesirable changes to Windows, I decided to restore my system. I have three images on a slave drive. I'm using a TI 9.0.2323 recovery disk. I chose the most recent image. Clicking on Proceed, I'm told restoration would take 1h 50min. I've restored my system many times, and it would always take approx 12 minutes. I cancelled the restoration and tried a different image. Again I'm shown a time of 1 h 50 min. I again cancelled and went back to the previous image. This time however I am no longer able to see my images. I then try a different recovery disk, TI 8.0.937 with the same result, unable to see my images. Is my only recourse now to reinstall Windows from scratch? Im certain those images are not corrupt, but I just can't get to them.

 

Hi dld,

What you report is really weird . As you are aware, cancelling the restore after clicking "Proceed" will leave you with an unpartitioned, empty, destination drive. However, the source drive should have remained unaffected.

After booting from the rescue CD can you see the slave drive at all?

Regards

 

Re: canceling restore leads to trouble

Hi Menorcaman... Weird is not the word for it. Recapping what happened. Yesterday I had deleted some files which caused MS Works not to function properly. Rather than trying to fix this problem with Windows, I decided to restore an image created Jan 15. As I said, using the recovery disk I could not see the three images I had created. I could see my slave drive including I think some folder called Recovery Manager. My slave drive has nothing on it other than these three images. Why this Recovery Manager folder I don't know. Maybe twice cancelling the restoration screwed things up. But then, why the long indicated restore time of 1h 50min for something which has always taken from 12 to 15 minutes. This is what made me abort restoration.

So after spending a sleepless night worrying about this, this morning I reformatted my C drive and reinstalled WinXP. I had not yet installed the drivers when I read your post and decided to give it another try. Wouldn't you know it, this morning I can see my three images on my slave drive. In restoring I chose to verify the image. Total time approx 20 minutes.

I'm uncertain now if I should stay with ATI 9.0.2323 or go back to ATI 8.0.937. BTW this morning I was using the ATI 8.0.937 recovery disk. But I had tried that same recovery disk last night without success.

I have a question for you in any case. I've had this computer for over three years now. Over that period of time I have reinstalled WinXP but always immediately restored from a Dantz Retrospect backup. You've got to proceed this way with Retrospect. Lately of course I have been restoring images from ATI. My HD has become "littered" with system files which defragging will not displace. This results in a HD on which there are no large blocs of free space. Is this something of no importance?

 

Hi again dld,

Glad you managed to recover the situation. As to the cause of the problem? All I can say is that on the odd occassion I've lost certain hardware functionality that could only be resolved by switching the computer off at the mains (thereby powering down the motherboard completely). So, did you switch the power off the previous night and then turn it back on the folllowing morning?

Turning now to the question of "scattered" files on your HD. Firstly, I'm assuming the HD is NTFS formatted. Windows own defrag utility does a reasonable job of reshuffling the clusters associated with an individual file so that they are contiguous. However, it doesn't necessarily always close up the individual files to leave a single large block of contiguous free space. Especially if Defrag has little room to breath i.e. the HD has become more than 75% full. Notwithstanding, this shouldn't affect the funtionality of programs other than your HD's read/write head(s) will be moving around a lot, thereby increasing access times.

Regards