F.A.S.T. WAY TO FRUSTRATION - HOW TO HATE A COMPANY

[Guest]

Hi. I m writing this post to express my total discontent and ask for some
advice, understanding and responsibility!!!
I converted my hard disk from FAT32 TO NTFS and it crashed. 6 years of mail,
useful documents et.c.
No worries I thought. WE GOT F.A.S.T. I made a backup every month, so my
last one was exactly after I converted to NTFS. (it crashed right after the
first reboot!!!)
No ability to get my data back. As everyone, I tried everything. Nothing
happened. No security update prob, no fastconv worked. Nothing. And so I
think. If I was a person working for the company or tallking on behalf of it
I would be looking down at my shoes. SO EMBARASSED. I tell people they can
backup their files. They dont buy a serious backup program. They dont backup
each and every file so often.( I got most my files back from backup to cds- i
never really trusted windows.) And now I give them silly little advice on how
to do nothing.In every post about FAST I see none of the advice works. Should
Micr be a company that has some respect for its programms, it should have
built a recovery utility the first day a person would have a problem. Did I
not care about my file, I would be writing down on paper! Hope some of you
share my feelings.
ps. anybody having tried something really special that worked , please
share. even if it is sitting on the same chair and clicking the same way on
did when creating the backup

 

[Harry Ohrn MS MVP]

From your post it is impossible to tell what you've already tried. For
example where was the backup stored? How did you attempt the restore?

 

[Guest]

you re right about that, its because i m so angry. i ll try to keep my head
though and let you in on the details.

i got 2 hard disks. the one i formatted - the one that crashed- had the win
xp on it. the backup was kept on my other hard disk. they re 40 and 80 gbs
respectively and they had - and have - more than 50% disk space. the size of
the backup was 1,5 gb aproximately. i attempted the restore by using the
start->tools->system tools->restore wizard. i use the greek version- exactly
the same - original - version i used before the crash. the wizard opens, i
check the right boxes, and when it reaches 2/100 (i dont exactly know if the
lines there are 100, but i mean the progress) it stops working without any
message for mistake. i used fastconv to a backup of the backup file, and it
stopped at a certain file, which i tried not to extract after i saw it
created a problem, but to no luck. i then copied the original backup files to
c:\usmt2 and tried the wizard (in case the files needed to be where the OS
is, but that didnt give me any new result.)

 

[Guest]

i forgot to mention that i also installed all the updates, xp sp2 included,
that i had before the crash. my pc is on many hours per day so all the
updates were automatically installed - before and after the crash.

 

[Pennywise]

|>you re right about that, its because i m so angry. i ll try to keep my head
|>though and let you in on the details.
|>
|>i got 2 hard disks. the one i formatted - the one that crashed- had the win
|>xp on it. the backup was kept on my other hard disk. they re 40 and 80 gbs
|>respectively and they had - and have - more than 50% disk space. the size of
|>the backup was 1,5 gb aproximately. i attempted the restore by using the
|>start->tools->system tools->restore wizard. i use the greek version- exactly
|>the same - original - version i used before the crash. the wizard opens, i
|>check the right boxes, and when it reaches 2/100 (i dont exactly know if the
|>lines there are 100, but i mean the progress) it stops working without any
|>message for mistake. i used fastconv to a backup of the backup file, and it
|>stopped at a certain file, which i tried not to extract after i saw it
|>created a problem, but to no luck. i then copied the original backup files to
|>c:\usmt2 and tried the wizard (in case the files needed to be where the OS
|>is, but that didnt give me any new result.)

So what you used as a back-up requires the OS to be up and running to
use...

 

[Guest]

sorry, pennywise , i don't understand what you mean by that...

 

[Pennywise]

|>sorry, pennywise , i don't understand what you mean by that...

Seems your recovery strategy reacquires XP to be running to work.

Instead of using restore use something like ERUNT
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

For backups use a LiveCD and a linux application
http://www.knoppix.org/

Nother words don't expect to have XP available when you need it most.

 

[Malke]

sorry, pennywise , i don't understand what you mean by that...

What I believe Pennywise means - and it would be my question, too - is
did you use a proprietary backup format and you need to have the backup
program installed in order to get your data? This, btw, is why I hate
backup programs that put the data in a proprietary format.

Even so, if you have all your data on the second hard drive and Windows
on the first hard drive, so what if you have to clean-install Windows?
What's the big deal? A clean install takes roughly 1-1/2 to 2 hours
from start to finish. Hook up your second hard drive and/or restore
data from the backups you burned to CD/DVD-R and go from there.

So what's the problem? Sometimes stuff happens with operating systems.
That's why there are backups.

Malke

 

[Guest]

I used the program windows has in order to back up my files, the filename is
IMG00001.DAT and there s also one file called status.
The reason i m so angry is that this is what i did. I reinstalled windows
and tried to restore my settings which had been saved to another hard drive,
but it s not working. and from a brief look i took around newsgroups, i see
this is happening to lots of people.

 

[Harry Ohrn]

I don't know if this will help but hopefully it offers you something more to
go with http://windowsxp.mvps.org/fast.htm

Personally I use very few of the apps that come with the Windows Operating
System as I too have found many of them to be either unreliable or lacking
in function. While this will not solve your problem now I'd strongly urge
you to look at third party backup solutions. I've used most of them and have
decided on Acronis TrueImage. However many people prefer Symantec Ghost or
BootIt NG.

 

[Guest]

thanks harry, I ve tried that (meaning the link) already...
i will look into the programs you told me about.
what a pitty , though, so many programs in windows, so little
reliability....thanks again

 

[Malke]

thanks harry, I ve tried that (meaning the link) already...
i will look into the programs you told me about.
what a pitty , though, so many programs in windows, so little
reliability....thanks again

Now that I understand what you did, I'm sorry for your trouble. It would
have been good if you had also made backups to removable media along
with leaving all your stuff on a hard drive. I'm with Harry - I would
never use NT Backup which was designed to back up to tape drives in the
very old NT days. For clients, I suggest SecondCopy or one of the
Acronis programs.

If the data is crucial, do nothing further with it and contact a
professional data recovery company. I recommend Drive Savers
(www.drivesavers.com), but of course there are others such as Ontrack
and Seagate Data Recovery. Professional data recovery is not
inexpensive, but only you can determine the value of your data.

Malke

 

[Ron Martell]

I used the program windows has in order to back up my files, the filename is
IMG00001.DAT and there s also one file called status.
The reason i m so angry is that this is what i did. I reinstalled windows
and tried to restore my settings which had been saved to another hard drive,
but it s not working. and from a brief look i took around newsgroups, i see
this is happening to lots of people.

You created the "backup" using the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard
in Windows XP, is that correct? That is not exactly what the wizard
is intended to do but it should still be workable.

The files you named are usually placed into a folder named usmt2.unc
and the FASTW restore process seems to work best when you point it at
a folder one level higher than usmt2.unc. So you would have a folder
named, for example, Transfer on drive D: and you would tell FASTW to
save the data there. It would then create another folder named
USMT2.UNC inside the Transfer folder and then place the IMG00001.DAT
and Status files into that folder.

When you run FASTW to import the data you would point it at the
D:\Transfer folder and from there it should find the USMT2.UNC folder
and the 2 files within it.

Also it is important that the Windows update status be the same for
the restore as it was when the data was created. There have been
updates to FASTW which have affected the structure of the data file
and version incompatibilities can occur.

Finally, MVP Ramesh Srinivasan has a web page about dealing with
corrupt FASTW data files at http://windowsxp.mvps.org/fast.htm

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2006)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."

 

[Guest]

malke , thanks. this is the first tangible-useful info i got so far on the
subject.

 

[Kerry Brown]

malke , thanks. this is the first tangible-useful info i got so far on the
subject.

Did you see the post from Ron Martell? The folder structure is crucial to a
successful import with FAST. If you altered the structure it may be the
cause of your frustration.

 

[Guest]

i saw it. the new thing that happened is that i got a pop-window which said
that migwiz.exe (TAST) shut down because of a problem. then another pop-up
window told me that doctor watson had to terminate. any ideas why dr.watson
terminated?

 

[Plato]

Hi. I m writing this post to express my total discontent and ask for some
advice, understanding and responsibility!!!
I converted my hard disk from FAT32 TO NTFS and it crashed. 6 years of mail,
useful documents et.c.
No worries I thought. WE GOT F.A.S.T. I made a backup every month, so my
last one was exactly after I converted to NTFS. (it crashed right after the
first reboot!!!)

Next time backup data to standard cds.

 

[Pennywise]

|>i saw it. the new thing that happened is that i got a pop-window which said
|>that migwiz.exe (TAST) shut down because of a problem. then another pop-up
|>window told me that doctor watson had to terminate. any ideas why dr.watson
|>terminated?


Start | Run <type in> drwtsn32 <enter>
and just disable the dear doctor, it's of no use to you and just takes
up space with it's dmp files.

 

[Guest]

I tried using FASTCONV to recover , but it stops when trying to analyze a
file and takes time doing nothing. I used the choice of not direclty
unpacking the files, but had no luck either. Is there some way I can by-pass
that or even delete the file inside the backup file Files and Transfer Wizard
creates?

 

[Guest]

I tried using FASTCONV to recover , but it stops when trying to analyze a
file and takes time doing nothing. I used the choice of not direclty
unpacking the files, but had no luck either. Is there some way I can by-pass
that or even delete the file inside the backup file Files and Transfer Wizard
creates?