Having trouble restoring after backup in XP

Ader1

I fitted and additional hard drive in my computer: drive d and I then used the backup programme which I downloaded for Windows XP home edition and baked it up on this extra drive. I then re-formatted my drive c and added Windows XP office edition which already has the accessory 'backup'. I then tried to restore what I had backup up on d and to the c drive. It can see the backup file on drive d and goes through the motions of transferring from one drive to the other. However, once finished, nothing seems to have been restored. i was attempting to restore 'documents and settings'. Does anybody have any suggestions? Thanks.

closed

if you're only bothered about documents and settings, copying the data from c to d would have been easier.

bkf files?

what does the log say

use macrium reflect free in future

Gold_bullion

Not sure what you are trying to do here, and what is XP Office edition? Do you mean XP Professional? Editions are as follows:



You seem to have backed up the original OS drive C: to a spare drive which is fair enough, and have then reformatted the original OS drive, presumably as part of reinstalling the new upgraded version of XP. So now the "Office" or Pro version of XP is on your C: drive.

If you now try to overwrite the active partition on your C: drive with the drive it will fail because you are attempting to overwrite the computer's in-use OS (i.e. the clever bit that is doing the copy) with a new OS clone from another drive. It can't let you do this, because if it did at some point you would be overwriting files that are actually being used at the time.

If you did actually want to use the cloned drive as the OS (bootable) drive, you must remove the C: drive from the PC and replace it with the D:drive as the bootable partition, thus restoring the XP Home version OS as the new OS from the alternate drive.

However, I'm guessing that what you actually want to end up with is the new uprated OS (i.e. the non-Home one) with the original My Documents folder that has all your personal files in?

In which case all you need to do is navigate to the My Documents folder on and copy all the files to the equivalent directory on C:

You can even re-designate the default My Documents folder on the boot drive C: to reside on instead - right click on My Documents from the Start menu and simply choose where you want to put it.

Your problem highlights why many users choose to have separate "user"and OS partitions in Windows from the start - then if the OS gets corrupted and refuses to boot, all your data is on a separate partition and not mixed up with the OS, which would then be overwritten when you reinstall it. It also makes backup much easier as you just backup the user files e.g. to a "cloud" based account shared between all your devices and thus never have to worry about losing your data.

Ader1

closed wrote: »

if you're only bothered about documents and settings, copying the data from c to d would have been easier.

bkf files?

what does the log say

use macrium reflect free in future

This is the backup log:

Restore started on 28/08/2013 at 08:52.
Restore completed on 28/08/2013 at 08:53.
Directories: 9
Files: 0
Bytes: 128
Time: 9 seconds

In fact, the above log is a restore I attempted to to this morning to restore my desktop....but to no avail. :-(

Ader1

Gold_bullion wrote: »

However, I'm guessing that what you actually want to end up with is the new uprated OS (i.e. the non-Home one) with the original My Documents folder that has all your personal files in?

In which case all you need to do is navigate to the My Documents folder on and copy all the files to the equivalent directory on C:

You can even re-designate the default My Documents folder on the boot drive C: to reside on instead - right click on My Documents from the Start menu and simply choose where you want to put it.

Yes....that's what I would like to do. But when I navigate to the My Documents folder on D, I cannot open and copy because when I do this the Backup utility is opened. They are I believe backed up as bkf files.

closed

how big are the bkfs

what exactly are you doing to initiate the restore

Gold_bullion

Sorry, I misunderstood - you had used the MS backup utility to make the original backup of selected data.

1) Are you certain you backed up all the data you now need? Roughly how long did the original backup take?

2) What size is the .bfk file on your drive?

3) Assuming it's bigger than a few kb (if not you're very likely to have lost the backup data or never had it in the first place), it's pretty common for these files to get corrupted apparently. You may have to use a third party piece of software to recover your data - this will only be worth attempting if the filesize of the backup on is of the same order of magnitude as the data you think should be on there.

How much data are we talking about roughly?

Ader1

1. Well over an hour I think

2. It's 4.64 GB's.

I don't have to re-install all of it although my favourites and desktop had things I would like restored but am not able to.

Ader1

closed wrote: »

how big are the bkfs

what exactly are you doing to initiate the restore

Using the backup utility, I choose the option 'Restore Files and Settings' and have then tried restoring the whole lot and also elements of using the tick boxes in the 3rd window I think.

NiftyDigits

Haven't tried it myself, but this tool should allow you to inspect the files in your backup. If it doesn't allow you access to them in order for you to move them manually, let me know.

Gold_bullion

Can you recall what you told it to backup in the first place?

If you told it to back up all files on your C: drive, including your Operating System (OS - the computer's system files or "brain" it needs to function), then if you do a full restore it will be trying to overwrite the OS files you are currently using with backups of those files. This will fail as soon as it tries to overwrite a file in use, which could explain why your restore is curtailed so quickly after only a few bytes, not to mention that your OS (an upgraded version of XP) is now different from the one you are trying to restore from (XP Home).

Instead, select only the directories for restore where your data is and just restore these. If you did not change the XP Home default, then look for your documents in C :\Documents and Settings\<user name>\My Documents. Unfortunately this is a manual process in that you need to know where you put the data in the first place.

I'm not familiar with the options of the XP backup facility, but it may be possible for you to search what you have saved, or failing that restore the entire backup to another location (for example an 8 GB memory stick or even a sub-folder of your system drive) and then do a search of those restored files for all the types of file that you know you have as data e.g. ".doc", ".docx", ".xls", ".mpg", thus ensuring you don't miss any. When you find them, simply copy them to where you want them on the C: drive.

The problem (I think) is that you are attempting to do a partial (data) restore into a new OS from what sounds like a full Old OS/data backup, which is a bit like trying to pull out several needles from a haystack.