Fooling Windows on Reinstall - Why Didn't It Work?

[Arthur Shapiro]

I'm curious whether anyone has enough technical saavy to point out the error
in my assumption.

I had (apparently) a disk failure in one of my two Raid-0 drives, and after
several days of trying to cope with it I admitted defeat. Purchased a fancy
new drive (no Raid, which I didn't want in the first place) and partitioned it
into C: and D: partitions.

I installed XP Pro into the C: drive and was pleased to have it come up fine.

I installed my backup program (Retrospect Express) and restored three
directories into D: Documents and Settings, Windows, and Program Files.

I booted up off a Knoppix CD, and went to the newly installed C: drive. I
changed Windows to XWindows, and ditto for Program Files and for Documents and
Settings.

I dragged the three directories from D: to C:.

I rebooted the machine and hoped I would come up, or at least would come up in
safe mode if it came to that.

To my surprise, it didn't come up, and reported that a file in
SYSTEM32/CONFIG, I *think* it was "SYSTEM", wasn't there.

I booted off the XP CD, and it offered to repair the newly-renamed XWindows
installation, but wouldn't acknowledge the Windows directory. And it refused
access to anything other than XWindows, meaning I couldn't drage files hither
and yon.

At this point I gave up, reformatted C:, reinstalled Windows, and am currently
going through the usual grief of installing scads of programs. (Moral: a good
backup is very helpful, but an image backup would have been a lifesaver here.)

Maybe Retrospect didn't back up everything in the Windows directory - I'll
confirm when I have it re-re-installed (!) - but perhaps this long message
will spark some discussion.

Art

 

[Shenan Stanley]

I'm curious whether anyone has enough technical saavy to point out
the error in my assumption.

I had (apparently) a disk failure in one of my two Raid-0 drives,
and after several days of trying to cope with it I admitted defeat.
Purchased a fancy new drive (no Raid, which I didn't want in the
first place) and partitioned it into C: and D: partitions.

I installed XP Pro into the C: drive and was pleased to have it
come up fine.

I installed my backup program (Retrospect Express) and restored
three directories into D: Documents and Settings, Windows, and
Program Files.

I booted up off a Knoppix CD, and went to the newly installed C:
drive. I changed Windows to XWindows, and ditto for Program Files
and for Documents and Settings.

I dragged the three directories from D: to C:.

I rebooted the machine and hoped I would come up, or at least would
come up in safe mode if it came to that.

To my surprise, it didn't come up, and reported that a file in
SYSTEM32/CONFIG, I *think* it was "SYSTEM", wasn't there.

I booted off the XP CD, and it offered to repair the newly-renamed
XWindows installation, but wouldn't acknowledge the Windows
directory. And it refused access to anything other than XWindows,
meaning I couldn't drage files hither and yon.

At this point I gave up, reformatted C:, reinstalled Windows, and
am currently going through the usual grief of installing scads of
programs. (Moral: a good backup is very helpful, but an image
backup would have been a lifesaver here.)

Maybe Retrospect didn't back up everything in the Windows directory
- I'll confirm when I have it re-re-installed (!) - but perhaps
this long message will spark some discussion.

Wouldn't work because the registry entries, SID of the computer, etc are
probably all different from old to new.