Vista - Restore Complete Computer

You're welcome Geo.

Thank you,
Shawn

I have a general knowledge question--

I'm running a copy of Vista Business x64 on 2 500 Gb SATA hard drives run in RAID 0. I ran a complete PC backup and made a copy to an external 1.5 Tb hard drive.

I want to replace my two 500 Gb Hard drives with another 1.5 Tb Hard drive. BUT since the backup image is that of a RAID 0 Vista installation, will it properly recreate itself onto a single hard drive? Or will the fact that it's made from a RAID 0 image interfere with that?

Hello Matthew, and welcome to Vista Forums.

No, it will still restore Vista just as it was when the backup was completed. The only problem you might run into is that you will need to uninstall the RAID drivers and install the motherboard chipset driver afterwards since you would not be using RAID anymore.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks Shawn for your prompt assistance! You were absolutely right--everything restored itself perfectly. This is a fantastic feature for people who don't want to hassle with reinstalling all their programs, and yet another reason I love vista

However, a quick side note in case anyone else runs into the problems I did--

When I tried reinstalling Vista, the installation aborted itself after I entered the product key, and I received an error message stating something like "Windows could not initialize the startup engine. Please restart installation and try again." Not the exact wording, but close. After googling around and searching the forums, I couldn't find any specific help on this error message or a specific solution. Then I remembered reading somewhere I needed an updated chipset driver for my motherboard (Nvidia 680i SLI) since it apparently does not natively support 45 nm CPUs (I just recently upgraded to an Intel Q6600 quad core). So, I put the new drivers on a flash drive, installed them, and was able to proceed with the installation and eventual restoration of my computer. Point being, remember to watch out for any necessary drivers when reinstalling your OS, especially if you get a nonspecific error message like mine (kind of a unique and quirky case, but it happens).

You're welcome Mathew. Thank you for sharing your results.

Shawn

Hi Shawn, first of all thanks for your very informative tutorials.

I have a question regarding my own setup. I have a 500 GB Seagate hard drive partitioned into C (250 GB for OS and Apps) and D (250 GB for Data) drives. I used Vista Ultimate's Complete Backup to backup both drives (actually partitions) into an external drive (eSATA).

I am now planning to upgrade from the 500 GB Seagate to a new 640 GB Western Digital drive mainly because I am hoping to get more performance plus a little more space from the new drive. I intend to format the new HD and again create 2 partitions (C - 340 GB for the OS and Apps and D - 300 GB for Data).

My question is would complete PC Restore automatically restore the backups from the old drive and partitions to this new drive and partitions that I will create? Or should I just let complete PC Restore format the drive for me? If so will it automatically create the partitions for which I then need to resize later?

Hello Cyclo,

It will only restore the backup and not any of the partitions. You will need to create the partitions first on the drive. The easiest way is do it from your Vista installation disc. Just go through like you doing a clean install of Vista and select the Custom and Advanced Drive Options, then shrink and format your partitions to size. Next, back out of the installation, or continue. Afterwards, do the restoration on each partition.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Well I finally completed my first Vista Complete PC Restore, migrating from a 500 GB drive (2 partitions) to a 640 GB drive (2 partitions). I had my backup on an external eSATA drive.

There were hiccups along the way. During my first attempts the restore fails with and error message that I now could not remember. I finally got that to work by changing the SATA channel (on the motherboard) to which the new hard drive was connected from 1 to 0. The old 500 GB HDD was originally connected to channel 1.

I found out that the Vista complete restore would format the new HDD and create partitions which are mirror copies of the original drive which was not my intent... I wanted a bigger C (System) partition. However, instead of re-running complete restore and restoring to one partition at a time, I decided to use the excellent Linux based open source partitioning software gParted (LiveCD iso free from Sourceforge). This tool allows you to move, resize, add, delete partitions. However you might need to repair the Vista System Partition (which happened in my case) after using gParted so it is best to keep the Vista Install disk handy.

To those interested, here is a link in How-To Geek on using gParted partitioning software: Using GParted to Resize Your Windows Vista Partition :: the How-To Geek

Thank you Cyclo for posting back and sharing your results.

I think it may have worked if you had created the two formated 650 GB partitions, then did the restore with step 5 left unchecked to not format. It should have then restored to the 650 GB partition leaving it's size intact and be restore with the old hard drive's content.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Hi Shawn, you are right... I missed un-checking that option in step 5 of your tutorial. I actually formatted and partitioned my new drive to the sizes I wanted but because I did not un-select that option on step 5 it got reformatted and repartitioned again to the size of my old drive. It could have saved me that extra resizing the partitions step with GParted.

The good news is I was able to try out and play with GParted which is also a great tool which goes beyond Vista's built in options in Storage Manager which only allows you to extend the outer most partitions but not the inner ones.

Cheers and next time I will pay attention to those options!