Vista - Backup and Restore Center problems?

Has anyone out there tried to do a complete backup using the Backup and
Restore Center in Vista Ultimate, and then replaced your hard drive and then
tried to do the "Complete PC Restore" from the Windows Vista DVD before the
PC boots up? When trying to do the complete PC restore, Vista Ultimate tells
me it can't restore my PC because "there are too few drives or the drive size
has changed". It won't attempt to restore my files because...I replaced my
hard drive with a larger drive? What's up with that? I didn't have a disk
crash, but I did change the number of drives. However, my "complete backup"
was taken from 1 physical disk drive with 2 partitions and stored to another
disk drive with 1 partition. Let's assume my C: drive failed and I had to go
to the store to buy a new one. Guess what...the size of my failed C: drive
is no longer sold as a new unit, but a larger one is. So I buy it and expect
to restore all my files from my last full backup. When I try, I get this
silly message telling me my hard drive size has changed and therefore, my
restore won't work. If this is really the way Microsoft designed this
backup/restore program, there's a serious flaw with someone's way of
thinking. I've been working on this problem with the Microsoft tech support
guys for a couple of days and we haven't made any progress so far. Maybe
tomorrow they'll figure something out to recover my data from my backup.

Just a guess but try this. You cloned a drive with two partitions. Restore
is looking for a drive with two partitions to restore to. The restore
program can't create the partition on your new drive.
Try partitioning your new larger drive into two partitions at least the
sizes on the old drive and then try the restore again.
--
qfreed


"DVD-Newbie" wrote:

Yep, Microsoft Tech Support had me do that and it still doesn't like the
configuration of my hard drives. My complete PC backup was done more than a
week ago and I can't remember which drives were installed, other than my
250GB hard drive that had a small partition for HP's recovery area. I think
it was about 6GB in size. After formatting this drive to install a fresh
version of Vista Ultimate, I made a second, 10GB partition on the drive to
try to fool the restore into thinking it was the same drive...but that failed
to work. I had this system setup with RAID 1 mirroring and I'm wondering if
I did the backup while that was in place. The backup should have seen the 2
mirrored drives as a single drive. I may have had 2 physical drives that
were mirrored, each having 2 partitions, and then my spare internal drive
that I use to store my backups. I currently have 2 physical drives without a
mirror. My first drive holds my logical c: drive and the 10GB partition I
made. The second drive contains my full backup.


"Qfreed" wrote:

Did you find a resolution to this issue? I've had the same problem. I
created a complete backup of my hard-drive (only 1 partition). This original
disk size was 160GB. The drive has a hardware failure last week. I'm trying
to restore the image (on an external USB drive) to my new 300GB harddrive. I
also get an error that says "there are too few drives or the drive size has
changed".

I'm using Ultimate version. Please tell me that this "disk size issue"
isn't a limitation built into this utility. I blindly used it with good
faith it would work like Norton Ghost does. That's why I paid extra for this
version.



"DVD-Newbie" wrote:

I don't know if MS fixed this problem or not, but it is a problem for anyone
who has a full backup and then replaces their hard drive for whatever reason.
That's poor programming in my opinion. I can't remember the exact process
of what I did to get past this, but there is a way to open your full backup
and Windows Ultimate sees the backup as an attached drive with all your
stored files in folders, just as they were on your C: drive. I had to get
some free downloadable software to do this and I can't remember what it was.
There were limited instructions with it and I had to figure it out on my own
by searching the web. I think the program was MS Virtual Server. Once I
could see my backed-up files, I was able to recover them, folder by folder,
to my new hard drives (RAID1). Sorry I can't be of more assistance with
this, but there is a way to view your backed-up files and recover them
manually.

Regards,

Steve
DVD-Newbie

"ASF" wrote:

I am having the same problem. Have 2 disks, adding up to 500G. One is going
bad so I bought a 1000G drive and tried to do the restore. EXACT SAME
MESSAGE YOU are getting!
Has anyone made this work??

"What good is a backup/restore that will only restore to the disk you backed
up from???!
--
Ed Turnock


"DVD-Newbie" wrote: