Unable to restore system from a previous restore p

[luminous]

Hi

I posted some comments just over a week ago on the features board, Barry replied to them. One of the things he meantioned was that I should try a full system backup and them attempt to recover the machine....

Well I am now trying to do this for REAL , and its not working...

A brief summary of what I am trying to do. I have a 120Gb HDD in this old machine, my new machine is about to arrive. The 120Gb HDD is for the new machine and needs to be moved into the new computer. I am intending to use the original old 30Gb HDD in the old machine. The system partition is about 8Gb in size and contains all the OS, Program Files and documents. The remaing space on the second partition has been used for the pagefile, movies and games. I want to transfer the system partition from the 120Gb HDD to the old 30Gb HDD.

I installed the old 30Gb drive, made 2 15Gb partitions. A backup of the system was made to the second partition of the old HDD. On the first partition of the old HDD windows Xp was clean installed. The 120Gb HDD was then removed, the machine booted and AIS installed. AIS was pointed to the backup on the second partition and told to restore.

All of your instructions were followed to the letter, no error messages were generated at any point.

The old machine is an AMD Athlon 650 running Windows Xp Pro SP1a along with Office XP Pro and many other programs. Version 1.8.1.186 of AIS backup is being used.

The fully "restored" system now has the following errors. A fully working totally problem free PC is available by simply taking out the 30Gb HDD and replacing the 120Gb HDD. With the 120Gb HDD in place the machine boots and has none of the errors that the restored 30Gb drive exhibits. Those errors are:

1) When attempting to access MS Outlook, the program loads, displays my inbox and then this message appears on screen

"Preparing to install..." - this messgae is in a box in the centre of the screen, the box is titled "Windows Installer".

30 seconds pass and then this message appears

"An error occured and this feature is no longer functioning properly. Please run Setup and select "Repair..." to restore this application - (the title of this Window is Microsoft Word 10.0)"

2) Attempting to unistall MS Office XP Pro from the Control panel
produces this message:

Window title "Add or Remove Programs"
Message - "Are you sure you want to remove Microsoft Office XP Professional with FrontPage from your computer"

I replied yes to this box

"Preparing to remove" now appears

about 1 minute time passes, the HDD showing very little activity, then this appears

Title - "Add or Remove Progarms"
Message - "The patch package could not be opened. Verify that the patch package exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package."

The only option available is "OK"

I am then returned to the desktop

3) Using the original MS Office XP discs, I inserted them and attempted to install or repair. Eventually the same message as above appears "The patch package could not be opened. Verify that the patch package exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package."

This means that I am unable to use MS Office, unable to remove it, and cannot install or repair it

4) A lot of the desktop icons are corrupt, using Tweak UI's repair option does not rectify this issue

5) Norton Protection reports that the recycle bin is corrupt

6) Excel, Autoroute etc wont run.

I stopped testing at this point, there are probably many other errors that I have not found. I dont understand how these errors are possible if the system has been completely restored. It appears that something is going wrong with the recovery process.

To ensure that I followed your insturctions correctly, I have reformatted the first partition of the drive, re-installed windows, and then tried to recover again. Exactly the same symptoms appear as above.

If you have any suggestions on how I should restore to resolve these issues I would be very grateful.

Thanks

Andy

P.S. I liked some of your suggestions to my post in the features section, but I would like to solve this little issue first b4 I concentrate on those more minor points

[Barry]

The symptoms you describe are either because for some reason the drive letter of the Windows restore changed from the original drive letter the sort folder name for MS Office changed. AISBackup uses techniques to circumvent both of these problems.

Is the restore to a new PC or to the same PC? If the restore is to a new PC is it possible that the Microsoft anti-piracy devices are causing the problems.

Please use the Help / Bug Report option to send us the log files and job files so that we may try and find a solution to this problem.

The restore of XP and 2000 to different drives and partitions is supposed to be one of AISBackup’s major strengths so I would like to get this problem resolved as soon as possible.

Barry

[luminous]

Hi, here is what I was trying to do any why

I am about to build my own new PC. I have already purchased several componets for this new computer, namely two 120Gb HDD's. One drive is an IBM, the other a Western Digital (dont ask why they are two different makes...). I am not using any fancy RAID arrays or other fancy controllers to access them.

The IBM drive has 3 partitions.

C Drive - 8Gb - containing the OS and all program files plus My Documents.
D Drive - 100Gb - data partition, music movies etc
Z Drive - 10Gb - this is my downloads drive. All new stuff goes into there while it is evaluated. If I am going to keep it, it gets moved to D Drive. This partition helps to reduce fragmentation on the other partitions, as files that i am going to keep get copied over in one chunk

The Western Digital Drive has one partition
E Drive - 120Gb data partition

Both of these drives are going to be removed from the current system and installed into the new machine. I have a 30Gb drive that was originally in the old machine. I wanted to transfer the OS from C drive to this old HDD. I did this as follows:
1) Disconnected the WD 120Gb drive (I have a CDRW and a DVD on the other cable)
2) Connected the old 30Gb drive and formatted it, then I created two partitions, both 15Gb
3) I then made a backup job in AIS that copied the entire contents of C Drive to the second partition on the 30Gb drive
4) IBM drive disconnected
5) Windows XP Pro clean installed onto the first partition of the 30Gb drive

Summary: I now have only one HDD attached to the machine, its 30Gb in size has a clean install of Win XP Pro on the first partition. The second partition contains the backup job from AIS

6) AIS is installed onto the new C Drive, AIS is then pointed to the second partition where is locates the backup of the Original C Drive. AIS then restores the system.


Error logging:
A no point during this restore were any errors displayed. I realise now that you will need the error log. Please can you tell me how you would like me to send this to you.
a) do you want a log of the backup being made before the 30Gb drive was attached to the machine
b) do you want a copy of the restore log (if there is such a thing)
c) do you want me to have another go at restoring the system over the top of the new C Drive (which was freshly installed, but now has the original attempts of a recovery
d) do you need me to reformat the 30Gb drive and start all over....

Please be very specific about how you want the error logs recording. I am quite prepared to give you the logs you want, but I dont want to have to repeat things several times to get the info you need

Andy

[Barry]

The ability to make XP and 2000 disaster recovery backups with AISBackup was introduced in version 1.7.

There is a Tools / Disk to Disk Copy option that may be used to set-up the new disk as it will save time.

You could use the Disk to Disk Copy to copy the current XP to the ‘new’ C: drive, disconnect the ‘Old’ C: drive, make the new the primary boot partition. After booting you should have a mirror version of your old system. There is no log for this function.

The method using backup job’s is shown on this web-page:

http://www.aiscl.co.uk/DisasterRecovery1.htm

There is one log file per job, Use the View / Backup Log option and click Copy Page then paste the ‘Copy’ into an e-mail. There is a drop-down combo box from which to select each backup or restore job.

Use the Tools / Edit Windows Boot Menu option to create the appropriate multi boot system, e.g. 1/ XP New Build, 2/ AISBackup Restore from Old XP build.

Barry

[luminous]

Thanks for the tips. I have been offline for the last couple of days while i built my new machine. I will test the disk to disk copy out very soon, as I have another system to sort out that will really benefit from that option.

Andy

[luminous]

Disk to Disk Copy on version 1.81

1) I loaded the program, went to Tools then Disk to Disk Copy.
2) A window appeared asking me to select files and folders that I wanted to copy, so I hit C: Drive.
3) I then pressed next, AIS went back to its welcome screen and did nothing

I tried again replacing step 2) with selecting "Auto Select", then Operating System
3) Again, pressing next dropped back to desktop

There are too many errors in the program atm for me to consider using this as my primary backup program. I have now settled on alternative. No doubt I will check back in a few months to see how AIS is going, as it does promise a lot of features that competitors do not have.

[Barry]

The disk to disk copy works okay on our Windows XP system using both version 1.8.1 and version 1.8.2. if there was an internal program error AISBackup writes a message to the Log form (Log Tab). Would you retry the copy and let us know if an error was reported in the log tab please?

Thanks

Barry

[luminous]

Yeah, there was an error in the log tab window, it reads:


11:50:11 START AISBackup started: 03 October 2003 11:50:11
11:50:23 EXCEPTION Exception: EAccessViolation: Access violation at address 005B4888 in module 'AISBACKUP.exe'. Read of address 00000000

I closed the program and then loaded it again to see if the error remained the same:


11:50:11 START AISBackup started: 03 October 2003 11:50:11
11:50:23 EXCEPTION Exception: EAccessViolation: Access violation at address 005B4888 in module 'AISBACKUP.exe'. Read of address 00000000
11:51:54 SESSEND AISBackup Session Finished: 03 October 2003 11:51:54


11:52:02 START AISBackup started: 03 October 2003 11:52:02
11:52:07 EXCEPTION Exception: EAccessViolation: Access violation at address 005B4888 in module 'AISBACKUP.exe'. Read of address 00000000


This error occurs on both of my Windows XP Pro machines every time I attempt to use the disk copy feature