System Restore Fails, can't boot XP

When I booted up my PC yesterday I found out thit my windows XP pro OS was acting funny and ıt seemed like a complicated issue to solve. Since I thought that I have a recent system backup I opened True Image and chose to fully restore the incremental backup I had of my system ( C: ) drive.
All seemed to be going ok until Acronis TI asked for a reboot. However xp refused to reboot, and I was stuck on the screen asking to press F11 for true image or <enter> to try to restart.
I then plugged in the Acronis boot CD and tried to restore the same system backup (residing on an external USB drive) from the CD version of TI. However, no matter how many times I try, the restore operation seems to be working for a long while, and then pops out a dialog box stating that the restore operation failed (no further details).
I suspect that during one of my trials I selected the wrong destination partition because when I explore my system after booting from a bootable CD now my original system partition shows as "unallocated", and another partition on another hard disk shows up as C: drive while of the partitions on this drive also shows up as unallocated (I guess I lost the data on that partition now).

I suspect that the restore operation fails because the wrong partition is labeled as C: drive but I really have no idea about what might be wrong.

Basically I have no idea about how to get my pc up and running again and any help would be largely appreciated (help me please!!) - thank you in advance for any hints & tips...

Edit: I have tried copying the backup files from the USD hard drive to one of the internal HDDs and to restore from there but i still got the same failed operation dialog....

 

When you restore, you have to ignore the drive letter assignments and choose your source and target volumes by using the volume names -- give your partitions descriptive volume names to make this easier.

Whe you restore a system partition, ATI uses linux and it won't assign drive letters in the same order and windows.

 

thank you for your reply!

...then that would mean that the fact that another drive is now called C: shouldnt affect the restore operation given that I make the right target drive choices (which I think I am).

The last trial i did now says "true image archive is corrupted (error 0x70020)".. but this only shows up in one of the restore attempts.

Just don't know what to do any more... :/

 

whenever a partition shows up as unallocated, that points to system file corruption. you can do a chkdsk c: /f that can usually fix that problem and make all the data viewable again.

Once you get the partition corruption fixed you should be able to restore to it and hopefully not have any more problems. That might have been your original problem causing windows to act up. Any files corruption on a hard drive will slowdown window's and eventually cause it to not boot.

All your data should still be fine as long as you don't reformat the drive, file corruption only affects some some files it won't destroy all the data.

 

I would also run memtest86+, free from www.memtest.org , to check the RAM. It could cause a failure in the restore and leave unallocated space since the partition has been deleted.

 

dtt,
Do have any other backup archive which are the "disk" option backup? This type backup includes all partitions on the system disk with nothing excluded?

When restoring your system partition, this is best done from the TI Rescue CD.

 

First of all: thanks to you all for replying and for trying to help...!

OK I managed to get my PC back up and runnning.

I noticed that the backup recovery always failed at one given point ("18 minutes left") so I figured that there might a problem with just one part of the recovery file.

I found an old, old backup from the earlier version of TI and recovered with that file (so I got my PC running but at the state it was last year i.e. the date of the file), just to be able to get into windows and installed TI.


Then I Explored the backup through TI and tried to extract the archive to an external drive. Here again, extraction always failed at the same file. - an unimportant one. So I extracted all of all the files in the corrupted system backup file onto the external drive, except the one that created the problem.

Then I went back off windows and erased everything on the system drive, and copied the all the files extracted from the corrupted file.

Then I restarted. XP loaded normally and Voila!!! Everything had been restored. And so far, there have been no problems.