Symantec System Recovery 2013 R2 Restore Questions These Questions probably apply to most, if not all, Imaging Solutions. I had trouble restoring Full Drive Images to two (2) Dell Windows 2008 R2 Servers recently. I had never had to restore an Image before. My company typically uses Symantec System Recovery as a standard Imaging Solution. The Data Partition of each of the two Servers got damaged during as a result of a Data Partition Shrink (Using the Windows Server 2008 R2 built-in Shrink/Extend Partition feature) followed by a Slide and Extend which were done by Minitool Partition Wizard Enterprise Edition in a bootable Live CD Environment. The Server seemed to be working OK until Symantec System Recovery tried to make a backup image at the normal scheduled time a few days later. Symantec System Recovery failed during the backup process of the Data Partition and the Data Partition disappeared from the Windows Server 2008 R2 Operating System. It was decided to try to restore a pre-Partition work Image but some problems were encountered with the partition size not matching the original size. It was then decided to delete all partitions from a Live CD environment followed by a Full Drive Restore. The Server would not boot. We located a Windows Server 2008 R2 Install DVD and performed the steps given in the following Dell Support link which corrected the boot issue: http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/SLN167714 The default options that Symantec System Recovery had selected were used. I saw that the Recovery Partition was set to Active. There were some other unchecked Options: "Restore original disk signature" and "Restore master boot record". Question: 1. What Options should I have selected for the Full Drive Restore to make these Servers bootable? Any other comments/suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in Advance.
Hi The Kid I have never used symantic, but I did something similiar with Shadowprotect, and it may help. The problem: my systems came with a standard win 7 x64 pro install. 100mb boot partition and then the c: partition. I wanted to get rid of the 100mb partition. So what I did is: 1. Imaged the disk with shadowprotect. This made an separate image file for both the 100mb partition and the c: drive. 2. I used an SP option to delete both partitions leaving the volume unformated and unallocated. 3. I used another option to create a new partition using all unallocated space. 4. Then I restored using the following options. a Make disk active b restore MBR from the image c restore the disk signature d restore the disks hidden track When Shadowprotect did the restore it checked for the boot stuff and not finding it, it did a boot repair. Hence a new bootable c: partition using the whole disk. Hopefully this might help. Pete
TheKid7, I recall it is an individual partition recovery. Attempting to restore all partitions at the same time isn't a good idea. For the Active partition... Verify recovery point before restore Partition type : Primary Check for file system errors after recovery Set drive active (for booting OS) Restore original disk signature Restore master boot record For the remaining partitions... Verify recovery point before restore Resize drive after recover (unallocated space only) (ONLY if you want to) Partition type : Primary Check for file system errors after recovery