- Oct 31, 2013
- 2
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- 10,510
I have a PC running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit off of a solid state drive. For some time, I've used the Windows backup software to keep a full backup of the drive on a WD Elements 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive (WDBAAU0030HBK-NESN). I had the computer freeze a couple of times, and then it would always just come up to a black screen after showing the "Starting Windows" animation. It would consistently start up in safe mode, but I was unable to identify any hardware or software problems.
I eventually formatted the solid state drive and reinstalled Windows from DVD. The computer now starts up fine, and all the hardware seems to be in working order. But what I would really like to do is restore the drive to its exact state on a date before I saw any problems, thus recovering all my programs, drivers, settings, etc. My impression was that this was the goal of doing a backup of the entire drive.
I originally tried to just boot the PC from the hard drive and run Windows backup from there. Further research indicated that I should have used the "Advanced Recovery Options" instead, but it's worth noting that Windows backup recognized the backup data on the external hard drive, and I was able to restore some files this way, just not programs and such. I also noticed that it restored a number of files that I had deleted before the date I selected to restore to--enough to have to delete some in the middle of the process to avoid filling up the drive. Why would that be?
My next, probably more sensible plan, was to use the advanced recovery options to restore from a system image. Whether trying this from Windows booted off of the hard drive (which restarts the computer before attempting the restoration), or from Windows booted from DVD, I ran into the same problem. The backup software came up, but when I browsed for the location of the backup data, this time it couldn't see my external hard drive at all. There was an option to add a device by selecting its driver, but I wasn't able to get this working. I tried saving, to a thumb drive, the drivers that Windows said it was using when booted up normally (disk.sys and partmgr.sys). The backup software could see the thumb drive, but I still couldn't get the external hard drive to show up. I looked for drivers on Western Digital's website, but the page said my hard drive just used the standard drivers in Windows.
So at this point I'm pretty much stuck. I've got a good backup and PC as far as I can tell, but I can't actually restore the system image unless Windows 7 can access the external hard drive while in this mode. Windows 7 backup has certainly proven to be more difficult to use than it was to set up. I'd greatly appreciate any thoughts on how to get this going.
I eventually formatted the solid state drive and reinstalled Windows from DVD. The computer now starts up fine, and all the hardware seems to be in working order. But what I would really like to do is restore the drive to its exact state on a date before I saw any problems, thus recovering all my programs, drivers, settings, etc. My impression was that this was the goal of doing a backup of the entire drive.
I originally tried to just boot the PC from the hard drive and run Windows backup from there. Further research indicated that I should have used the "Advanced Recovery Options" instead, but it's worth noting that Windows backup recognized the backup data on the external hard drive, and I was able to restore some files this way, just not programs and such. I also noticed that it restored a number of files that I had deleted before the date I selected to restore to--enough to have to delete some in the middle of the process to avoid filling up the drive. Why would that be?
My next, probably more sensible plan, was to use the advanced recovery options to restore from a system image. Whether trying this from Windows booted off of the hard drive (which restarts the computer before attempting the restoration), or from Windows booted from DVD, I ran into the same problem. The backup software came up, but when I browsed for the location of the backup data, this time it couldn't see my external hard drive at all. There was an option to add a device by selecting its driver, but I wasn't able to get this working. I tried saving, to a thumb drive, the drivers that Windows said it was using when booted up normally (disk.sys and partmgr.sys). The backup software could see the thumb drive, but I still couldn't get the external hard drive to show up. I looked for drivers on Western Digital's website, but the page said my hard drive just used the standard drivers in Windows.
So at this point I'm pretty much stuck. I've got a good backup and PC as far as I can tell, but I can't actually restore the system image unless Windows 7 can access the external hard drive while in this mode. Windows 7 backup has certainly proven to be more difficult to use than it was to set up. I'd greatly appreciate any thoughts on how to get this going.
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