Dennis Jlussi

Vista Complete PC Backup on RAID drive

This time it really hit me hard: The Mandriva 2009 RC1 live installer formatted one of my RAID 0 hard disks without prior notice. Oh yeah, I have a backup on the other RAID array, made with Vista’s great new “Complete PC Backup” – which didn’t work. So this time, Linux and Windows performed a great co-operation in driving me crazy.

Ok, so the disk was formatted and therefore the RAID 0 array destroyed. Sad enough. First of all, I had to repair my DVD drive, which didn’t work for a while. It was just a bit dusty, so I opened it and cleaned everything and it worked again. Then I booted from the Vista DVD for the repair mode. Then I experienced that my second (working) array was not recognized. Ah, drivers missing. Both, Promise and Asus don’t find it necessary to offer drivers for a four-year-old mainboard on the internet, so it took me half an hour to find appropriate drivers. Anyway, then everything seemed to work fine: Boot from DVD, choose repair options, Vista automatically finds the backup and knows where to restore it to. Too easy.

No, it’s not that easy. I got an “file or directory corrupted” error. I tried twice, then I installed a clean Vista to perform all kinds of checks to the backup drive, everything was fine, but not working. Then I found out that the Complete Backup is a .vhd file and that other software is capable of restoring from vhd. So I installed some commercial software, burned a rescue CD, booted from that. Same result: It finds the backup and knows what to do with it, but can’t write.

There are some other threads on the net on this issue. I doubt that this damn Vista feature works on RAID drives at all. After hours of trying and internet research, I found a solution:

1. Install a clean Vista on the broken array and switch off “user account control”.
2. Install the Vhdmount feature of MS Virtual Server 2005 (downloadable at no cost). See these instructions in German (I didn’t manage extracting the msi out of setup.exe, but you can choose the vhd function only in regular setup) or google for it in English.
3. Install xxcopy freeware edition.
4. Find the .vhd file under the “WindowsImageBackup” folder and mount it using vhdmount.
5. Xxcopy all content from the newly mounted drive to a directory (either on the backup drive or on the formerly broken array) using the /backup parameter. This will show some errors, don’t care.
6. Reboot from your Vista DVD, go in repair mode and open a command line.
7. Xxcopy everything from the folder mentioned before to C:\, use parameters /backup and /y.
8. Reboot from hard disk and enjoy your new old Vista installation

My system is fully functional. The only thing I recognized is that Vista lost information about the Vista updates I chose not to install and offered those to me again. But that’s not too bad.

Now, this took me almost the whole day. Why does Mandriva not ask before formatting a harddisk? Why does Vista not check whether the backup can be restored to the drive that is backed up? And does anyone have a good recommendation for a backup tool that works with RAID drives?