So, Again, Just when i want to write a thank you to Microsoft, they insist on making something so annoying that you just have to write something against them, I have never been a big fan of there products, Lazy is what i think they are, if i sold a copy of my software to everyone on earth, i would surely employ more programmers for that product.
Anyway, There is a new distro of Linux you might like with eye as good as Vista’s eye candy, and perfect for so many uses that it can server as a free replacement that i think is even superior to the all paid Windows, UBUNTU Linux, especially 7.10 is real cool, Anyway back to my problems with the all mighty Vista backup tool
I was really looking forward to using there backup and restore tool, So, as you can imagine, i started by backing up my computer, To both 2 DVDs and a different Hard disk drive.
Now, to restore, i got a different hard drive, installed it on that same computer, Popped in the windows installation DVD, went through the repair process until i got to the complete system restore window, popped in the last DVD (DVD 2/2) into the drive, and voila, i am restoring, Oh wait, Not another error message, what’s wrong this time Windows.
Windows Complete PC Restore operation failed.
Error details: There are too few disks on this computer or one or more of the disks is too small. Add or change disks so they match the disks in the backup and try the restore again. (0×80042401)
Nice, what’s that all about
After investigating the issue, it seems we need to have the same number of Disks (And that is accurate, not same number of partitions, same number of DISKS), Hooked in the same exact way, having the same or larger size than the one that was backed up.
Sure, for (the dynamically expanding VHD they borrowed from there Virtual machine software(s)) maps a hard disk and acts as if it was full sized etc, etc, But MS could have written software to shrink the (Disk Size) of the Virtual Hard drive, and i am not talking about the one that compacts the data, nor am i talking about the one like in VMware that defrags a virtual disk.
A small app, probably with allot of reuse code from MS Virtual PC, that takes a hard drive VHD image, reads the actual data, and dumps it into a new drive, one that you might have created using MS Virtual PC.
Some of you will post replies to this saying, the backup info is in the XML files, but trust me, before you modify the XML files you need to modify the VHD file !
Anyway, at the minute i will try Acronis True Image 11 and let you know what happens, there is always some developer (Or Team) out there that has the software for the Job .