Norm -> Raid1, Win7 won't restore

[mikeford]

Biostar 760GM2+, AMD X2 250, 2x Seagate 2TB, Hitachi 500GB all ata, windows 7, currently running MS ATA driver 6/21/2006 6.1.7600.16385.

Win7 initially installed on one of the 2TB (waiting for 2nd to arrive), did all the updates, system running fine for 2 weeks. Second 2TB arrived, so I did a backup using the Win7 utility including the system to the 500GB drive (leaving 63GB free, so way more than files were backed up).

Installed the 2nd 2TB drive, created the Raid1 with rom utility and set it to raid in the bios. Win7 did not like it, kept giving a can't install os message, wouldn't boot. Tried lots of things, something about the drive order appears to have been an issue, OS only installs on primary drive. Eventually I was able to install Win7 as a new install on the Raid1 array.

Running the Win7 restore while booted from the raid, it restored data files, but no programs or the system. It doesn't seem to see a system image. ***

Running the Win7 restore while booted from a CD/DVD (recovery disc or Win7 installer) it won't restore to the Raid array *** (vol name looked like junk or code, slashes numbers etc)

*** Sorry not to have more specifics, but 4am and the huge time lags between booting from the CD to try options, and I just wasn't writing stuff down. I plan to redo stuff tonight and get the details, but wanted to get this question up in case is something simple I am doing wrong.

Current simple wrong thing I am thinking is that first OS install I named the system Media-PC, couldn't remember when I did the Win7 install to the raid and used HTPC-PC.

 

[mikeford]

I just booted from the recovery CD, selected system image recovery, Win7 on my Raid shows up, and System image on my 500GB drive shows up, couple do you really mean it clicks, then after about one dot on the progress ...

No disc that can be used for recovering the systems disc can be found.

more stuff I could type but its error: 0x80042412

 

[RebateMonger]

The 0x80042412 error is often related to disk sizes. In the Vista version of Windows Complete PC Backup, for instance, you couldn't restore to a disk that was smaller than the original disk no matter how much data was involved.

If you had a single disk, for instance, backed it up, and then put it into a RAID 1 array, the resulting Virtual Disk would often be a bit smaller than the original size of the disk. When you tried to restore the backup from a non-RAID disk to a pair of identical RAID-ed disks, the restore would fail. You could restore to a single disk but not to a RAID 1 array built from two of those disks.

Some of these issues were addressed in Win7/Server 2008 R2. But I'd definitely take a look at your arrays, partition sizes, and data sizes.

 

[mikeford]

From MS web site, key bit seems ...

"Also, make sure that the disk that you're restoring the backup to is the same size or larger than the disk that you backed up."

Considering we are talking likely a difference of a few KB on a 2TB drive, wow does this annoy me. Its why I hate MS, a supreme waster of time with its quirks.

I'm going to snoop around a bit more for a clean solution, but it has already far past the time required to install and update Win7 and all the applications. What makes me the most angry is that this will now never be a really "clean" install with all the attempts at fixing.

 

[FishAk]

I'm curious at to whether ,when you originally backed up your drive with the Windows utility, if you used the “Create a system image” utility. I assume you used Windows backup utility for all your files and such, but for the actual OS partition did you create an image? I've never used Windows stock utility to backup, so I don't know if it prompts you to make an actual image, which is separate from a backup.

 

[mikeford]

Late night work, but near as I can tell I actually told it to make both a system image, which is recognized by restore, and a data file backup. Further google and reading keeps showing the same issue,

Restore insists on making partitions at least as large as the source volume had. When this fails, error 0x80042412 and it quits.

DOUBLE FUNNY
The main reason I am trying to restore is that I hate wasting so much time with a fresh install turning off MicroSoft "features" I don't want, and installing reliable third party products that behave.

 

[RebateMonger]

There were manual workarounds for some of the disk size issues in Vista/2008. You had to do some preliminaries before initiating the restore. I'm not even sure that's your problem, but the error message points in that direction and I've definitely seen it happen in Server 2008 (non R2).

 

[mikeford]

Acronis or Reflect are what I plan to use, too late to fix this fiasco, I'm about 75% finished in the Win7 install, update, turn off useless features, and activating good replacements.

 

[FishAk]

I like Reflect. One thing to remember is that images are fragile. They don't like to be moved or de-fragmented, and should be originals- not copies. For this reason, it's good to make a partition on the inside edge of your disk(s) just for storing your images set(s).

 

[mikeford]

Wow, thats odd they would make the file dependent on physical storage details. Was everybody smoking crack on how to make a reliable backup day in school?

I also have Acronis, so may use that or both.