You can't depend on TI to restore!

Tale of woe!!
I cleaned up my Windows XP Home by running AdAware and Spybot, defragged 'C', and set a restore point.
I then imaged 'C' to a clean partition on another HD. The image verified OK.
I burned a DVD of this image. This image also verified OK.
I installed Windows XP SP2 from a Microsoft CD. XP would not accept my modem driver which has worked OK for three years,
and kept crashing to a black screen.
I restored 'C' to pre-SP2 from the HD image, TI reported that the restore had been made, but on reboot my computer froze on the XP splash screen. Windows would not boot past the splash screen in 'Last Good' or 'Normal' modes.
I then booted from the TI CD to try a restore from the DVD image. TI would not recognize the image as a *.tib image although it had verified OK!!
System Restore would not restore from safe mode so I had to repair XP.
Questions:
1. Why did TI report that 'C' had been restored when it hadn't?
2. Why did TI verify the DVD image as OK, then refuse to recognize it as a *.tib file?
3. Have other TI users reported problems after installing SP2?

Roger

 

Hi

No problem here (TI 8.0 Build 771 with Windows XP Home Edition + SP 2).

Regards

 

If it went through the process of restoring the image completely, then it did restore the image. Now, if there is something wrong with the image that prevents Windows XP from booting, then it sounds like there is another issue at hand. You may have been able to determine the cause of the boot failure by examining the event viewer in Safe Mode, but since you've already done a repair install, that point may have already passed. (Not sure if repair install clears out the event viewer or not)

What software did you use to create the DVD? What format is the DVD in (ISO, UDF, Packet-written UDF, etc)?

No problems here, either before or after SP2.

 

Optical media are OK for some things, but come one, if you have any data you can't live without they have got to be the last option. I went for a cheap external drive a few weeks back and it is the best thing I did. In particular it frees me up from having to be around to feed my computer optical media at backup time - not to mention the fact that a hard disk is much less fragile than DVDs/CDs. Also I find having all the files in one place and organised by subdirectory, is much better than trying to keep track of DVDs/Cds on a shelf.

 

I would just like to second this. I use an external USB2 drive for all my imaging and get very fast image creation and restores. I do store original clean installs of my OS on DVD media, just in case my USB2 fails. In all honesty I think it would be very unlikely, or extremely unlucky, to get both an internal HDD failure and an external USB HDD failure. Either way I am covered.