TI 11 Restore Failure

My Vista system on my XP+Vista dual boot has been a model of reliability for a year or so now, but after today's M$ updates to Vista and Office my Vista system failed to restart. System Restore failed to get it going so I restored my last ATI full partition image from about a week ago. The system again failed to boot into Vista but would boot into XP OK. Images are held in folders on an eSATA drive and have been successfully restored on numerous previous occasions, but only to undo minor changes, never because of a serious system failure.

I then restored two earlier full images, but what was restored was not remotely like the system that had been imaged and neither was functioning properly at all.

It was my understanding that tib images are supposed to completely overwrite the partition to which they are being restored, making it impossible in theory for system problems to persist over a restore.

So what can possibly have happened here? It certainly looks atm as though my Vista system is unrecoverable. Is there anything else I can try before reinstalling Vista - a pretty daunting task in view of the amount of stuff on the system!

I'm posting this from XP which seems unaffected by all of this.

 

Hello Earthling,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please clarify if you restored MBR and Track 0 along with Vista partition (if it's not on a separate hard drive)?

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Hi Marat

The first time I tried restoring just the partition, and when that failed I tried the MBR and Track 0.

On reboot after restore it would get as far as the screen with the copyright symbol followed by Microsoft Corporation with green bars moving left to right, but then after a short delay the monitor gave No Signal.

If I rebooted into Safe Mode it would get to a desktop, but with a warning to the effect that my personal profile could not be loaded and a temporary profile was in use. It was nothing like the system that had been imaged and was unusable.

I tried several different images, including one that has been restored previously without problems, but all gave similar results.

The Vista system appears to have been lost, but XP is fine, so it isn't the hardware failing.

 

Nothing has changed with this. Using my VistaPE boot disk I can validate each of the images I have been trying to restore, and after each restore I am assured that the restore was successful. However when I try to boot up I get the symptoms in #3.

This is so frustrating, as I know for absolute certain that at least one of my images is restorable as I have used it before.

Anyone?

NOTE: I have established that it was one of yesterday's Vista or Office 2007 updates that first caused this problem, as I have performed a clean Vista install to the same partition and then run Windows Update. There were over 50 updates, and one of the last five to install caused exactly the same symptoms as in #3. However the process of retoring an earlier image to the same partition should have overwritten this.

EDIT - I have just restored a very early Ghost image to the Vista partition and that boots normally.

 

Hello Earthling,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup software

It sounds like Vista User Profiles was located at another partition and were moved or deleted. Could you please check that your User Profiles were restored with the image of your Vista partition?

Thank you.
--
Michael Levchenko

 

I only have the one Vista partition and usually I just select either that or the XP partition for a full backup. I haven't made any changes to Vista User Profiles recently and have always assumed they are backed up along with everything else. The Vista profiles were operating normally before this problem brought the system down.

After reading something here the other day though I did do my first full disk backup (2 system partitions, 3 data), though I can't see how this could have affected the ability to restore previous images.

 

Earthling,

I thought of your post when I read a thread on one of the Borland delphi newsgroups that refrred (indirectly) to "the endless reboot issue", so I have copied the text below in case it is of some help:

----------------------------
Posted on Borland delphi/non-technical NG


"Gil" <maravillasoft@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I did install the Vista Update SP1 in my laptop then I had this nigthmare
>http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2748299&SiteID=17
>

Bummer... did you try the solution on page 10/10 @ http://forums.microsoft.com/technet...9&siteid=17&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=9

Solution:

Press F8

Choose Recovery and Utility

Choose C: for repair

Choose "Run the programs", or "installation drivers?" (I am not exactly sure that english term, coz I'm using chinese windows)

Then you can see the box, asking u to choose the installation programs

Go to C: --> Windows --> winsxs

It will display many folders, if u cannot find pending.xml

type *.* on the "open file box"

and u can see the pending.xml

rename it to pending.old.xml

and restart!
------------------------------

Hope that this helps you.

Pig

 

Hello Earthling,

Could you please collect some information to let us investigate the problem thoroughly?

Please create Acronis Report as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Then submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov