Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite & USB External Hard Drive

Gday

Up to this point I have used either Acronis or Paragon for my backups, I prefer Paragon over Acronis, mainly because the restore by Paragon is far quicker.

I have both bootable CD's, but in this instance I would like to concentrate on Paragon.

I downloaded Paragon's Advanced Recovery CD. 2009 Build 6730. Put it in my rom and booted ....... looked at a black screen for 10 minutes. Removed it and rebooted, it got stuck at the loading of Vista, then I got another black screen no hard drive movement.

Rebooted again, this time with the regular Paragon bootable CD. It booted into the recovery console.

Now this is where things go from bad to worse. I tried finding my OS, after a lengthy period I received an error disk 2 i/o fault!!! ....... no operating system found.

Now disk 2 is my external hard drive where my backups are kept.

So I rebooted with the CD in, went into the recovery console and clicked on "safe restore", after playing the waiting game I get a message disk 2 i/o fault!!!.

Took out the Paragon CD, put in the Vista one, tried a repair, but there was no OS to repair

So I installed Vista, and because I didn't want to have to reinstall all of my programs again (yer lazy I know, but that's what backup's are for).

Checked with the fresh install, that my two external hard drives, had there drivers and were present. They were both accounted for in Vista.

So put back in the Paragon bootable CD, got to the recovery console, tried a "normal restore" and once again got disk 2 i/o fault!!!. So I tried a "safe restore" same error message. Back tracked to see if my OS was still there and IT HAD GONE!!

So again I installed Vista, checked with the fresh install, that my two external hard drives, had there drivers and were present. They were both accounted for in Vista.

Put back in the Paragon bootable CD, got to the recovery console, tried a "safe restore" and once again got disk 2 i/o fault!!!. Back tracked to see if my OS was still there and IT HAD GONE AGAIN!!

So yet again I installed Vista, this time I tried copying over the latest backup to a partition that the Paragon recovery console could read.

Tried again, and yup you guessed it lost the OS again, this time the error message was disk 0 i/o fault!!!

Once again I installed Vista, this time however I installed the Paragon software, initially it wouldn't find my backups, but I was like a dog with a bone and eventually got Paragon to locate them.

This time I tried a restore from the Windows environment, crossed my fingers, my eyes and my legs, eventually Paragon said it needed to reboot to continue the operation. I rebooted, and the recovery looked promising, but I could not sit there and watch it, waiting for it to fail, so I went and watched the TV for a couple of hours.

I came back to my PC, and OMG shock horror, EVERYTHING WAS BACK!

Now for the question, I have used the recovery console before and it found my USB external hard drives, why this time could it not?

Footnote : I also tried my Acronis bootable CD, it loaded, then the screen went black.

I have since done a backup to my external, just to make sure it was still viable, it worked without a hitch. I also did a backup on a partition, that is on a different hard drive to my OS, just in case I run into this problem again. Whether or not it will be read is a whole different story.

System Manufacturer/Model Number Homebuilt
OS Vista Ultimate 32 bit
CPU AMD Phenom II x 4 965
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P
Memory 4GB DDR3
Graphics Card Nvidia GeForce 9800GT
Sound Card Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio
Monitor(s) Displays Phillips 19"
Screen Resolution 1280 x 1024
Keyboard 12 year old Compaq, cant see any of the letters anymore
Mouse Microflacid Sterile
PSU Thermaltake 850W
Case Coolermaster Storm Black Edition
Cooling AC-ALPINE-64PRO ARTIC COOLING
Hard Drives 1 x 1TB Sata 1 x 160GB IDE 1 x 2Tb WD External My Book Elite 1 x 1TB WD External My Book Elite
Internet Speed ADSL 1500mbps