Restore doesn't work
I carried out a whole disk backup two nights ago when my Windows 7 Update facility wouldn't work (on my HP Pavilion Entertainment laptop). Yesterday my system became more unstable. For example, although Word and Excel were accessible, my WordPerfect and Quattro Pro files were not. I got "seems corrupt" messages.
I then tried to restore using Acronis. It's not a particularly user friendly program. I checked all five of the partitions even though I thought I only had three (NTFS C:, NTFS Recovery D:, FAT32 HRTools E:). The other two were MBR & Track 0 and NTFS System. I went ahead and the program worked for half an hour or so, and then I got a failure message. I now tried to be selective and managed to get C:, D:, and E: to correspond to the original locations, and left the other two blank. A quarter of an hour into the restore I got another failure message.
I troied to restart Windows normally and was immediately sent into Startup Repair. That was at two o'clock last night. This morning the Startup Repair is still working. I have no idea whether it will be able to cobble together anything resembling an OS or how long this is going to take.
I think I'm in trouble.
Can anyone offer any help?
I'd be very surprised to find a replacement HD for my particular model of laptop (DV7 series). But I noticed that there is an option to restore hard drives to larger capacity media. Is there a compatibility issue here?
Is there a way to extract individual files from a full backup of my computer on an external hard drive onto some other medium?
Can I restore my computer to a new hard drive, dissimilar from the original (but bigger), just in order to access the data files?
Thanks.
Robert, there should be no issue with getting a replacement internal hard drive for your HP Pavillion laptop - the key factor that you need to understand is what technology it uses? Older laptops used PATA / IDE connections and were mostly limited in size to around 100GB. Newer laptops use SATA drives which can be upto 1TB in size, but with common sizes ranging from 120GB to 500GB. SATA laptop drives 2.5" are reasonably priced and should be fairly easy to replace - do a search on YouTube for the prcedure for your HP laptop model if you have never done this before.
If you have access to another computer, then you can explore your Acronis backup files from there, assuming that you either have the program installed or are using the bootable rescue media. That will allow you to recover any of your specific data files.
Once you have a new hard drive, you can also contact Acronis Support for help in recovering as this can still be gained without having to pay, as is advised in the post below:
18623: How to get Technical Support: Tips, Tricks and Useful Information
5. Recovery issue
- Related to recovery issues with the full version of the product
- Free of charge
- 24x7
- Not limited (Assistance with the recovery issue can be requested any time, even if you’re out of 30 days free support and don’t have PPI)
- Provided with e-mail and chat
Response time:
- 3 business days via e-mail
- immediate via chat
Robert,
When you restore partitions to partitions, make sure you use the characteristics of the target partition to make sure it is the one you need. It can happen that the recovery medium assignes very different drive letters, for example.
Since you had issues with programs in Windows, you should need to restore only the c:\ partition. If the issues are with user files, you don't need to restore the whole partition.
Another thing you can do is create a Windows start up disk, and run chkdsk on your main internal disks. Maybe you only have a NTFS information issue, and your disks are still fine.
Many thanks to everyone who replied.
I bought a new HD but so far I have not succeeded in restoring any partitions to it because at least two of my Acronis backups appear to be corrupt (though I HAVE been able to access most of my data).
Before trying a third Acronis backup I do have a few questions (which perhaps it would have been wise for me to ask earlier):
1. Should I use the 64-bit version of Acronis or the ordinary one? (My laptop is a 64-bit machine, so I imagine the answer is yes and that version is the one I have been trying.)
2. Pat L's suggestion to restore only Drive C: is encouraging, so Drive D: (Recovery) and E: (HP Tools) can be ignored. But what about these other two partitions (which I didn't know existed): 1) MBR and Track 0, 2) NTFS (SYSTEM). Should I select one or both of these as well as Drive C:?
3. By the way, a short while ago I had the messages: MBR Error 1 and MBR Error 2. These seem to be related to Windows 7, but I thought my win7 OS was virtually destroyed. The messages have made me very uneasy.
Thanks for any help.
Robert, you should be able to use either the 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Acronis as you have a 64-bit laptop as both should work the same, though the performance of the 64-bit version would be expected to be better as it can handle larger amounts of memory if installed.
If you have an entire disk backup image (as you indicated you had in your first post), then the simplest method for recovering your system to your new hard drive is to restore the entire disk back again and let Acronis take care of all of the partitions for you.
See the ATIH 2016 User Guide section on restoring your entire disk which has the note:
In case of Windows 7 the System Reserved partition will have the Pri, Act flags. You will need to select for recovery both the System Reserved partition and the System partition.
The System Reserved partition is the hidden NTFS System partition that you discovered. MBR = Master Boot Record which is information that is held in the first tracks of the hard disk, so is not a partition but vital information that holds the keys to how the disk is formatted, where partitions are etc.
Restoring the MBR for one of your entire disk backup images should resolve the MBR errors you are seeing.
I would recommend booting from the Acronis rescue media and then check that you can see your new HD and your backup drive holding your Acronis image files, then run a Validation of the image from there.
Thanks a lot for your response, Steve. I was very unlucky with that third backup. I started a full disk recovery and it got about a third of the way through before the power cut out because I hadn't noticed that the power cable had come out! When I retried the restore, the process got only about a tenth of the way before it failed. Could the power cut have damaged the backup?
You should know, by the way, that I have since validated all three backups and found that the three drives were corrupt on the last two and C: and E: were corrupt on the third. So is it likely that the power cut could have damaged two separate drives (the System drive and the HP_Tools drive)?
Which brings me to the good news.
Last night I found an even older Acronis backup and I have successfully restored it! So I now have my Win7 OS back on a new hard drive. The only problem is that it's two and a half years old.
So my question is: is there a way to replace Drive D: on my now working computer from the 3rd backup (made last January)? You see, it's the Recovery drive, where all the restore points are kept (or so I believe). There are bound to be restore points from last November or December.
Could there possibly be compatibility issues between C: and E: of November 2013 and D: of January 2016?
Robert, I am sorry but the Recovery drive - D: is not where any system restore points are kept but rather would provide to restore the system to a factory install state. Restore points are held within the System Volume Information hidden folders on your OS drive C:\ and this is where you would need to check whether your backup images are using the standard, default set of Exclusions, as if so, System Volume Information is excluded from backups!
Hm, that IS bad news.
So, does Acronis have anything available to restore corrupt backups?
Robert,
Please see KB document: 1517: Troubleshooting Issues with Corrupt Backups for some suggestions for dealing with corrupt backups.