Vista Tutorial - windows complete backup

I deleted from my external sata drive all previous backups (incremental and disc image). When I fire up "create windows complete pc backup and restore image, i click on the back up computer button, the system looks for backup devies, which it finds, my external hard drive on "F". I then click on "next" and I see some text about "backup location", which is correct. Down below this, in a box where it says "the following discs will be back up", is blank. It does not show drive "C". There is nothing in this box, and this makes me sad, because, of course when I click on "start backup", I get the error message, "the backup failed". The error message is "The specified number of volumns is invalid. (0x80780010).

I orginally deleted all the backups from my external drive because it was running out of space, so I thought I'd clean them out and do another backup and restore image. I now realize that the old ones would be auto removed if the new backup started to run out of space. How foolish of me.

In the meantime, I can do incrememtal backup (create backup copies of your files and folders), which tells me it wants to do a full backup (of all my data files, etc- obviously not a full system backup, which of course it aint designed to do.

Now, I saw in a thread in this site a post which said to get remove the message that old backups exist, go into the registry under...........windows backup and delete all entries upder windows backup - which I did to no avail.

So, why don't I see drive "c" in the window??? Also, above the window it continues to tell me two earlier images exits (from december and june on the "F" drive, though they have been deleted).

What did I break?

Thanks

Hello Nelson,

Not sure what you may have broke.

However, doing a System Restore using a restore point dated before you had this problem may be able to fix it for you. Afterwards, see if it will let to run the Back Up Computer option.

System Restore - How to

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Shawn, thanks for the info. But, I'd rather figure out what is causing this, and then fix it. Since I deleted the images from my external drive, I don't know that rolling back to a saved system restore point will help, or do more harm. Anyway, the tinkerer in me wants to solve this issue, so if anyone can think of anything, let me know. My suspision is, it's something in the registry.

Does anyone know where in the registry would be info about backed up images?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

Nelson

Since Vista cannot find your C: drive while trying to do a complete computer backup, then there is very little chance of manually fixing this. A System Restore will be a lot easier and safer to do. After the System Restore, you can use the tutorial below to clear the last complete computer backup location listing since you do not have it anymore.

Backup Complete PC - Reset Last Backup Listing

Thx for your reply. For the record, I'm using vista x64 ultimate. I will give this a shot tonight. But, what do you think is causing this issue? Somewhere in the OS there is a boo-boo. Would love to know where to look to try to fix.

Thanks,

Nelson

Nelson,

My guess is some form of corruption in the registry or a system file. Those two areas are like a needle in a hay stack if you do not know where or what to look for. It wuold cause a lot more problems if the wrong item gets deleted or changed. If this is the problem, then a System Restore will fix this.