Help Please:Hard Disk Manager 12: Can't get Restore to work

I have Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12, Windows XP Pro. My main drive with my operating system consists of 2 pata hard drives, running RAID 0 on a Promise controller.

My problem is that when I use the Paragon rescue boot CD, it will load, but then when I choose to Restore, I get a message "Ancient Bootloader" and then the Restore program will not load, it just hangs at a black screen.

I tried using a Paragon rescue CD that it based on WinPE. That starts fine. However, it will only find my external hard drives, and will not find my RAID array (that's the one with my operating system on it).

I am going to assume it's because it doesn't have the RAID driver by Promise on it.

Is there any way to make either the Paragon linux based boot CD, or the one with WinPE work?

I really like the Paragon program, but it is unusable if I can't restore my system.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

You can add drivers to the WinPE boot medium. You need the 32-bit files uncompressed (no EXE or ZIP file) and point the program to the INF file.

 

Thank you so much This did work but took some searching in how to get "load drivers' to show. Apparently I was in Advanced mode and couldn't find it there. I changed to Wizard mode and so that option to Load Drivers was there.

It did load my RAID driver fine, and then it showed my RAID drives. However, the drive letter is showing as F, when it should be my C drive. My external drive which is connected via E-Sata shows as the C drive. Is there an option in there to switch those drive letters?

My concern is when restoring my RAID 0 drives which is my C drive in Windows, the Paragon recovery CD won't be able to properly restore.

I also note in the Paragon program (not the CD recovery progrm) that it calls my external E-Sata drive "Drive 0" and my RAID is called "Drive 1". I hunted around to see if I could change that but found nothing.

 

I tried doing a restore this morning for one file to see if restore would work. I loaded up the Paragon Recovery CD WinPE based. I then loaded the driver for my RAID and it then saw my drive. However, once again it showed as Drive G, and not Drive C. Drive C name was designated to my external E-Sata drive which is the drive that has the Backup Capsule on it.

So I did a restore to original location for one file to see if it would work, since my original filed was stored on my C drive, and Paragon renamed my C drive to the G drive.

It did not work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

The letters assigned in the WinPE environment are usually different from the letters that Windows Explorer shows.

When I work with partitions in Paragon programs (which is the only thing I do, I don´t back up or restore files with these programs), I identify the partitions by name (label), size, etc., and not by the assigned letter. I dont´know if this is possible in your case, but you could try something similar. Don´t rely on letters.

 

Thanks so much for the reply, I greatly appreciate it.

I used Paragon to make an image of my hard drive. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Where would I identify the partions by name? When I was doing the Restore, I had the option to restore to Original Location which is what I did. But, because Paragon recovery renamed my external drive to C, and renamed my drive with the OS which I'm trying to restore, I'm wondering if that's why the Restore won't work.

I guess I could always delete the Backup Capsule and put it on another external drive, then unplug the E-sata drive which keeps getting renamed the C drive, and try to restore like that. I was just hoping I could use the E-sata drive for my backups because it's a larger drive.

I really want Paragon to work right because I'm frustrated with Acronis which can be buggy.

 

You can always reassign the drive letter after the restore and before you reboot.

 

Thanks very much for the reply. I didn't do a total restore because I'm afraid it's going to mess everything up. But I chose a subdirectly of my C drive to restore, and chose "original location." So when I rebooted into Windows, I looked for the restored subdirectory, and instead of where it should have been, it had something like F drive subdirectory, and then within that was my restored subdirectory. I hope I explained that ok.

I'm going to play around with it some more and see what happens. I'm debating whether I should keep the Paragon installed, or install Acronis True Image 2013 which I just bought with a rebate deal. Would it be okay to have both programs installed, or would that not be good?

 

Yes, I understand now. Yes, that's the way Paragon restores even a single file, you'll see a folder with the drive letter(c disk) or something like, subdirectories, etc.

 

Thanks, Bill, I appreciate it. So if I try to restore my hard drive image, then it's not going to put it back the way it should be, since in Restore it's showing my C drive as the F drive?

 

Restoring files is not the same as restoring an image. You could have a file backup of every file on your disk and restore it to a new disk and it would not be bootable.

 

I don't have multiple drives so it's a bit different. Before a restore I have a C drive but after I've had to assign it as C drive but since I don't restore that often I don't remember what it's assigned after the restore. Sorry!

 

You don't even need to think about it. Drive letters are assigned differently in the recovery environment.

Paragon will do the job. The restored image will be fine.

 

Thanks very much for the replies. I've done a full restore with Acronis in the past and thankfully it worked.

I'm kind of nervous with Paragon since it's renumbering my hard drives and Acronis never did that.

Maybe I can make a virtual drive, back that up and try a restore on it to see if Paragon works correctly. I'm too chicken to try a restore on my main hard drive with my OS and programs.

As an aside, what I want to do with Paragon is use it to move my OS and programs to 2 new SSD hard drives which I'll be installing as a RAID 0 so it will be seen as one large hard drive (with my old hardware, this seems to be the best way to do it).

But then after I get that done, I want to be able to use Paragon as my main image backup program.

 

UPDATE: Ok, so last night I deleted a subdirectory on my main hard drive (the one with the OS), and then used the recovery cd (winPE based) and did a restore, and it worked perfectly.

I don't know why it wasn't working before other than maybe it was the parameters I chose in the restore process. I think I may have chosen to replace the file no matter what, instead of only replace if the file was deleted or changed. This time I chose to only replace if file was deleted or changed and it worked, so I don't know.

Anyway, I feel more confident now that if something happens to my system, I can do a restore successfully. I think I'll still try a few more test runs though, as I can be a little obsessive

I would still like to know why I get the "warning: ancient bootloader" when I try to use the Linux based recovery cd, and if there's a way to correct it. I think that is probably related to the problem I'm having with Acronis True Image Home 2011. It used to boot fine into the Acronis program from the recovery cd, but now it loads the Acronis Loader fine, then I choose the full Acronis True Image program to use to restore from, and the screen turns black with a blinking cursor in the top lefthand side.

Thanks again everyone for all your help and input. I really appreciate it.

 

Ace88,
"Ancient Bootloader" means that Linux-based environment is not compatible with your Hardware.
... Win PE is the best boot media to use because it has the most hardware compatabilty.

 

Joseph, thanks very much for your reply. My hardware is pretty old. I built this computer in 2006. Probably time for an upgrade I guess I'll just use the WinPE CD I have for now.