B & R 2011 (advanced) FREEBIE

The latest version of Backup & Restore 2011 (advanced) freebie was successfully installed and tested. But after creating the recommended "Recovery CD" testing failed - the CD boots successfully on my Toshiba Satellite laptop running XP SP3 and brings up the first (and sometimes second menus). But when trying to run the recovery the screen goes black and all activity stops.

The CD appeared to be created normally so i have no idea what could be causing this glitch. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Bewildered Bob

 

My first inclination is to say that the Linux environment used for the recovery CD is not compatible with your PC. This is not a totally unusual situation and happens with all backup and recovery products using Linux and even to a far lesser extent using WinPE. There is not much you can do about it other than report it to Paragon but I have no idea how much support they might provide to the Free version.

What I find a little strange is that you sometimes get the second menu and sometimes not. Have you tried creating the CD again or better still try creating it on a USB flash drive or by using a different CD burner?

It works OK on my Toshiba Satellite A100 but they aren't all the same.

 

Does the live cd provide something similar to safe video mode? You can try that.

 

Good point. The B&R 2011 Free recovery CD does have a Safe Mode which they say to try if the Normal Mode doesn't work.

I don't know if there are any restrictions with the Paragon Safe mode which is based on some variant of DOS. I know in True Image things like networking weren't available and it tended to be slower.

If it works for you then great.

 

I used to use safe mode in paragon special edition giveaway products since the linux recovery cd didn't work in normal mode for my PC. The safe mode provided GUI and mouse was available for use. The paid versions have windows PE based recovery CD which work with most systems

 

Thanx for the good suggestion - Safe Mode works for me.

No longer bewildered Bob.
Palm Bay, FL

 

Glad it works, Bob. I take it this means you have abandoned TI for Paragon. I recall you had some issues with TI although that was some time ago.

 

YES T.I. has been abandoned in favor of the Paragon B&R freebie. Now i backup to an unused partition on the HD and copy the image to external USB drive. The image then resides in 2 locations so i assume i'm "golden" if a restore is needed. It's still a mystery why direct backup to external USB drive fails to validate properly on 2 Toshiba laptops but works well on Dell desktop. Thanx for all help provided.

Bewildered Bob