TIH2012 rescue risk reads disk structure incorrectly after win7 upgrade
This is about the unexpected and unusual performance of the bootable recue disk created by TIH2012.
Until last week I ran Xp3. Before upgrading to win7, I backed up the entire PC in drive parts (12 logical drives on 3 physical HDD). The backups were stored on a drive specifically reserved for that purpose, at the time, drive D. The upgrade was painful and I used the bootable media made under the XP3 installation several times to get back to a status quo. Eventually the upgrade succeeded, but in the process it renumbered the partitions and thus re-lettered all the drives on the system (detail of why and how available but not terribly relevant). Each drive except C moved at least 2 letters. Relevant to this query, the drive letter where the backup files were located changed from D: to K:, but the backup file contents are as they were when saved.
Today I created a new bootable rescue disk using TIH2012, and tested it to check functionality. Very surprised when, after starting TIH2012, selecting recovery then pressing the button to "search for backups", the disk structure presented was not the current reality, but the pre-upgrade listing. That is, the backup drive was shown as D;, not K:. That's a situation just waiting for disaster. Selecting the wrong backup file and restoring it to a different but wrong drive would really cause a lot of anger about the product.
Why did the TIH 2012 copy on the rescue disk do this? Browsing for backups surely means looking in the current drive structure, not one that has disappeared.
How can I arrange for the rescue disk to reflect the actual present drive structures and contents?
Interesting. For years after I first used TIH (various versions) the bootable rescue disk listed the disks in the same order (letters and names) as they appeared in the windows regime. It's why I raised this issue. It was a new installation (the pain part was getting the Win7 upgrade disk to boot and change to an NTFS partition in the same operation. Basically: boot, delete C: on Fat32, select unoccupied space as location of new partition, and Win 7 created a new NTFS partition and installed OK). As an install went, very slick. But as I said, the end result was that all the drive letters were changed. from an administrative point of view, a pain in the butt: a massive job going thru the re-installs patching the links with related data that's now on a differently lettered drive.
Once the new OS was in place, all the applications had to be re-installed. An upgrade to DD11 showed the disk structure to be the same as explorer. So - thinks I - why doesn't the TIH boot image see the structure the same way? It is, after all, looking over the hardware to find that out.
Fortunately, all my disk partitions are named by function of content. But this is still a trap for the unwary. A restore of a data drive over an applications partition would really cause havoc no matter how unintentional.