2011 - can't restore from 2nd DVD-ROM drive

I'm trying to restore a backup archive on my laptop.

It only has a CD-ROM drive. I backed up onto a USB-attached DVD-ROM drive. Since my laptop won't boot from that drive, I also created a recovery CD-ROM.

Now I need to recover onto a new hard drive in that laptop.

I can boot just fine using the 2011 Recovery CD, in Normal mode.

But when I start the Recovery process, although it finds the DVD-ROM drive it can't find any archive on it. I know there *are* archives on it, as I can see them on another PC.

I happen to have a 2010 recovery CD lying around. That has the ability to boot into a linux command line. When I do that, I see that linux has mounted the built-in CD-ROM drive but not the DVD-ROM drive.

So I manually mount it - "mkdir /media/cdrom_sr1; mount /dev/cdrom_sr1 /media/cdrom_sr1"

Then I can list its contents using "ls". I exit, and start the Recovery program - voila - it can see the archives. But it can't recover from them because this is a 2010 recovery CD, and the archives are 2011.

If the 2011 Recovery CD had a way of starting the Linux command line, I could fix this using the same trick as with 2010 ... BUT IT DOESN'T! There doesn't see, to be any way to start the command line in 2011!

Can anyone help?

Thanks

 

Don't know if I can help much. I assume you are using the free program so you don't have access to the WinPE CD.

What about making a bootable flash drive instead of a CD so you don't need the CD-ROM and disable it in BIOS. Maybe this would cause the program to look for and find the USB-DVD drive.

Can you copy your archives from the DVD to a USB external HD which hopefully will be seen?