My broken rig is a home assembled ASUS mobo with AMD Core2 3200 cpu and 2 gigs of memory operating with Windows Vista Utimate. It had two ATA hard drives and a DVD/burner/player.

Three days ago my C:\ drive refused to boot up Windows. I tried every alternative Windows offered and the thing hung up after ambling down to "crcdisk."

So, I bought a new SATA Seagate hard drive and set it up with Windows Utimate and tried to read the old C:\drive, but it is "unreadable." However, I was able to read my E:\drive, and found a full restore system back up of the broken C:\drive on that drive dated the day before we left on vacation, so it is a perfect point to restore from. I copied it to a spot on the new C:\drive, but can not get WINDOWS to go to that file and do the system restore.

Yes, I have searched for help, read the WINDOWS help, went to Microsoft's newsgroups and have found nothing on this problem.

Any help would be appreciated.

What program was this full backup made with?

minidrag said:What program was this full backup made with?

Was it made with Windows backup or a third party program like Acronis ? Without that answer it's going to be very difficult to help.

It was created with Windows Vista Home Premium. I did a "back up computer" option, whch can be found on the Windows "Control Panel" under the "back up and restore computer" icon.

Re-reading your post just above this, it looks like you did the full computer backup. That creates a virtual drive, which can be read back in for a restore. It restores the entire drive though, so I wouldn't think a different version of Windows would work correctly with it. It is a VHD file, right?

Thanks for sticking with this issue for me.

I'll try what the article says and let you know how it turns out.

Are you just trying to get some files out of there or do you need the whole installation? If you are just after files did you see this section?

Restore a File from Complete PC Backup
I should mention, for thoroughness, that a Complete PC Backup can be used to restore individual files. While intended for restoration at the volume level, Complete PC Backup stores data in a .vhd format, and this means you can use the offline VHD mounting tool to access and restore individual files. (At the time of writing this article, the VHD mounting tool is only available as part of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, which you can download from microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/eval/virtualserver.) To mount the backup, open a command prompt with elevated privileges and navigate to Microsoft Virtual Server\Vhdmount. The command is:
Copy Code

vhdmount /m [path of the .vhd file] [drive letter to assign to the virtual hard drive]

When doing this for the first time, the system may not pick up the required driver since it is unsigned. This will cause an error message that says the device driver could not be loaded. To solve this problem, after plugging in the .vhd file using the command above, go to the Device Manager, right-click on the new device that shows up, and select Properties. From there, go to the Driver tab, select Update Driver, click Browse my computer for driver software, and select Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer. The correct driver file will be located at Microsoft Virtual Server\Vhdmount\vhdstor.inf. After installation, the new drive will appear and you'll be able to browse the latest Complete PC Backup and copy the files you want to an alternate location.

Try calling MS support - I think Vista comes with one or two free support incidents.

hychka said:My hired gun was able to show me how to locate and "copy and paste" e-mail files and documents out of the PC System Restore point and into a made up "restore" folder. From there I imported the e-mail into my Windows E-mail and the documents into "My Documents"...pictures, too. The method is slow and somewhat cumbersome, especially as to e-mail files, but it works.

Apparently Windows PC-System Restore hangs occasionally...even the Windows page explaining how to backup Vista implies that it is not to be trusted solely.

Anyway, I'm out of the woods and have my files back. Nice to have a university full of techies down the road a piece!!

Go Boilers!!!

This is why I use a out side program like trueimage..never fails and keep a cd boot disc with it all...