Rescue and recovery crashes

[CM]

Hi,

I just joined this forum, hoping that someone here might be able to help me. I have a T43p and am using Rescue and Recovery 3.01.0037.00 to do a monthly backup to CD. Since about 3 weeks I R&R crashes right after I put in the name for the backup and click OK. I don't get any error message other than the Windows notification that the program has encountered a problems and had to be closed, given me the option to inform Microsoft.

After that notification R&R closes, but I am still asked to input a CD, which is burned with the Boot CD information. After that, nothing else happens.

I have not had any new installs of software or other changes on the system. The only thing I could come up as a reason is the monthly Windows patch.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Christian

[Ken Fox]

Hi,

I just joined this forum, hoping that someone here might be able to help me. I have a T43p and am using Rescue and Recovery 3.01.0037.00 to do a monthly backup to CD.

Thanks,
Christian

Several points. Although there is disagreement, many here feel that R&R is not the best system backup option out there. Among other issues, it does not backup the system partition, and some have had bad experiences trying to restore a system from removable media when needed. I am definitely in the group that wouldn not use R&R for my regular system backups.

R&R CAN serve a function even for those who don't like it much otherwise. That function would be when one is away from the home or office, such as on a trip, experiences software corruption or other problems in the absence of a hardware disk failure, and has no easy way to otherwise recover. I have successfully used R&R this way a couple of times in the past.

If you agree with my assessment, let's look at the options available. First, for R&R, I would uninstall altogether your version 3.xxx which was quite buggy. Download version 4, which I have used successfully even on older laptops. You can either download version 4 via System Update, or directly and install it manually. A simple search on the Lenovo website will find the links for system update and for Rescue and Recovery. Even if you want to continue using R&R as your main backup tool, I would still uninstall v3.xxx and replace it with v4.xxx

I would not back up the system at this point, rather I would clean up my windows installation with a registry cleaner such as CCleaner.exe (free, donations accepted) and then defrag either with whatever you have or maybe PerfectDisk, which is not free.

THEN, once the system is buffed up, I would back up the system with a good standalone hard disk imaging product such as either Norton Ghost 2003 or Acronis True Image, both of which are commercial products. I'm sure there are good freeware imaging programs out there as well, I just don't have any experience with them. If you use Norton Ghost 2003, I find it best to use it from floppies (or a self-booting CD); you must select the -Ib switch, e.g. "image boot," in order to image the unique IBM boot sector which differs from your standard Windows boot sector as it allows booting into the recovery partition.

I would "image" the hard drive at this point onto other media, preferably onto another hard disk such as a USB2 hard disk, or DVDs. Once you have imaged your hard drive, which I do regularly although not necessarily once a month, depending mostly on the frequency of significant software updates, you can then use Rescue and Recovery to make a backup onto your Thinkpad hard disk.

Every time I make an image of my hard disk, I delete all R&R backups beforehand. This reduces the size of your image backup by about 1/3 and since the information contained is just another copy of the hard drive at an earlier point in time, there is no need for it. Then, I do another "base" backup with R&R, if the laptop is one I use for travel. At the present time I am only actually using R&R on my two X-series laptops as I don't contemplate traveling with either of my other Thinkpads. If I was going to travel with them, however, I do have R&R 4x installed on them and it would be a quick and simple maneuver to make a base backup on them.

If you want to be even more paranoid, which describes me fairly well, you can purchase an additional hard drive for the notebook you travel with, put a copy of the main hard drive's contents on it, and put the spare drive into a 2.5" USB2 enclosure. The result of this is that there is no on-the-road hard drive failure that you cannot recover from with the aid of a small phillips head screwdriver.

Finally, the above deals with backing up your system, e.g. your windows installation and programs; it is not how I would back up my data. If you want to make that part easy, use a separate directory for all your data. You can make one and call it "data" or somesuch, or you can use Billy Gates's built in "My Documents" directories for that. You will need to tell all your programs to put their data into the subdirectories of your data directory. Then, make regular backups of the whole data directory, which might be small enough that it will all fit onto a cheap USB2 Flash drive or other flash media, or you might want to burn an optical disk with the information should you have lots of data to backup.

[dcouzin]

Ken Fox, many thanks for your comments on backup methods. Relative beginners like myself need this advice. You recommend R&R v4x over R&R v3x. Unfortunately my T42 is not supported, so I, along with many in this forum, am stuck with buggy R&R v3.1. I described my v3.1 problem in the OS forum, http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=40103, where there was no response. Perhaps T40, T41 and T42 ThinkPads are already antiques, so R&R v3x problems need to be posted in this forum instead.

Anyhow, do other R&R v3.1 users get this erroneous error message I got, preventing creation of a rescue CD?

Create Rescue Media: Process failed.
Up to 1.6 GB of temporary hard disk drive space is needed
to create rescue media. Either move or delete files from your
hard disk drive to provide the required space; then, restart
the "Create Rescue Media"procedure.

Why does R&R v3.1 think there is less than 1.6 GB space when there is about 16 GB space? Is there a cure or a workaround? There are other ways to create bootable CD's. Can one be made which accomplishes what the R&R v3.1 rescue CD would?

My other R&R v3.1 bug is that it quits in mid-backup, announcing "backup cancelled". I think I solved this by turning off virus protection, and several other ongoing processes.

It is interesting that R&R v4 is better, since I feared Lenovo couldn't produce good software. Now how do pre-T43 owners urge Lenovo to produce the necessary patches for the R&R they can use, v3.10.0030?
Thanks.

[Ken Fox]

Perhaps T40, T41 and T42 ThinkPads are already antiques, so R&R v3x problems need to be posted in this forum instead.

Anyhow, do other R&R v3.1 users get this erroneous error message I got, preventing creation of a rescue CD?

Create Rescue Media: Process failed.

Why does R&R v3.1 think there is less than 1.6 GB space when there is about 16 GB space? Is there a cure or a workaround? There are other ways to create bootable CD's. Can one be made which accomplishes what the R&R v3.1 rescue CD would?

My other R&R v3.1 bug is that it quits in mid-backup, announcing "backup cancelled". I think I solved this by turning off virus protection, and several other ongoing processes.

It is interesting that R&R v4 is better, since I feared Lenovo couldn't produce good software. Now how do pre-T43 owners urge Lenovo to produce the necessary patches for the R&R they can use, v3.10.0030?
Thanks.

Just out of curiousity, have you tried to install R&R 4 and not been able to? I would definitely uninstall R&R 3 beforehand and consider doing a little manual directory and file deletion myself just to be sure that any remaining components of the old program were gone. Unless the software will not install, I'd bet it will work, and might be worth trying. For sure, I would make an image of my hard disk beforehand, just to be safe. V4 DOES work with my X32, just fine. I seem to recall when I downloaded v. 4 that I read on the page that the X32 was supported whereas the X31 was not, which makes just about no sense that I can think of since they share identical components except for the processor. and maybe a minor chipset or chipset variation. It may be that they just haven't tested R&R 4 with the T41 and T42, but they might well still work.

If I was stuck with v3 and if it did not work for me, I'd just uninstall it and forget it altogether. Presumably you do have an intact service partition and in desperate circumstances you could still get emails or browse the internet through a wired ethernet connection.

Another possibility would be to buy another cheap hard drive, like a 60gb 5400rpm model, then clone your original hard drive contents onto it, then bring that drive with you in situations where a hard drive problem would be difficult to deal with. Then, you could swap the spare hard drive in and go about your business, in circumstances where otherwise you might have used R&R.

In reality, the likelihood that any given person is going to ever actually use R&R to restore their hard drive is not great, and if you are away from home or the office and your hard drive becomes unusable, the odds are it will have been due to a hardware failure and not something that R&R could have helped you out on anyway.

[dcouzin]

No, I didn't try installing R&R 4, based on Lenovo's not including T42 in the list of supported systems. One wouldn't know if an R&R worked until the desperate moment when a full system restoration is needed. One has hope that R&R 3.1 will work then (since Lenovo tested it on one's system). (BIOS for T40/41/42 is different from T43.)

My drive has only the two-part partition as when new: the visible C:\ drive and an inaccessible (to me) area containing some sort of image of the C:\ drive as IBM loaded it. Can I assume that the various R&R programs, while having access to the inaccessible area, never modify that area?

Looking at my T42 body, its left side of completely different design from its right, even in the framing of the screen, all considerations of elegance vanish. One just wants the thing to work. In this sense, if my R&R v3.1 is working except for refusing to make a bootable rescue CD, I'd be willing to ask if any other T42 owners could send me their R&R v3.1 bootable rescue CD. Bury the bug.

The R&R 3.1 bug is after all not well know, and is probably my fault. I replaced the original IBM R&R v1 with IBM R&R v2. Then replaced that with Lenovo R&R v3.1. Then returned to R&R v2. Then returned to R&R v3.1. This is not competent work. I'm a fiddler on his system, over his head, hoping to learn in this way. Eight years ago I used GoBack on a Win98 system, which allowed everyday daring until the party ended with expensive professional help. It is people like me, who are numeruos, who most need R&R.

[Ken Fox]

The R&R 3.1 bug is after all not well know, and is probably my fault. I replaced the original IBM R&R v1 with IBM R&R v2. Then replaced that with Lenovo R&R v3.1. Then returned to R&R v2. Then returned to R&R v3.1. This is not competent work. I'm a fiddler on his system, over his head, hoping to learn in this way. Eight years ago I used GoBack on a Win98 system, which allowed everyday daring until the party ended with expensive professional help. It is people like me, who are numeruos, who most need R&R.

If it wasn't for tinkering with my systems, I would never have learned anything about them. Tinkering is good, tinkering is useful, tinkering is great; screwing up your system is however not great. The way you avoid doing anything you cannot recover from is to have system backups. In my worst case scenario, as recently happened with MY former T42, I downloaded PC Doctor 5 via Software Installer. Although I could have edited the registry and (maybe) fixed the problems, it was oh, so much easier, to take a 2 week old Norton Ghost backup I'd made in the normal course of events and write over the hard disk.

With that and a few updates to download, plus putting my separately backed up data onto the drive, it was good as new.

If you keep several backups around going back a couple or three months, there is probably nothing you cannot recover from with an hour's worth of effort. A USB2 hard drive, which you can either buy or put together yourself in 5 minutes, is a cheap, reliable, and easy way to back up multiple systems. If you have old system components around, you can put old hard disks to use for this purpose. There are cheap IDE to USB (and SATA to USB) converters one can buy in the USA for less than $15 that will allow you to use just about any old hard disk for this purpose.

[CM]

Hi Ken,

many thanks for your comprehensive answer to my post. The reason why I use R&R is as you describe: I do a lot of "tinkering" and when I run into trouble I often find it easier to revert to a backup rather than spending a lot of time editing the reg. What I need to restore is only apps and configuration. My data I keep in one folder structure, which I backup separately to a 1 GB USB stick and an external HDD.

For what I do, 3.1 has so far served me well, until recently. I have to qualify my problem though. When I tried again yesterday, I accidentally forgot to mark that the backup should go on CD rather than the hard disk, and wonder, even though I got the same error message again and R&R seemed to have closed, it did in fact continue and stored a backup on the hard disk. I will try again now if the same will happen with CD.

The reason that I do not use v4.0 is because my most recent backup is over 4 weeks old and I have changed quite a few things in the meantime (nothing that should have affected R&R though).

Anyway, I will check again if 3.1 works and if not, what it will take to move to 4.0.

Thanks again, will keep you posted.
Christian

[James Koo]

Hi Ken,

Seems you know a lot about back up. I just re-installed my T42 Type 2374 from restoring disks with only data back up (no system back up).

Previously the computer crashed after I updated the R&R to V3.1. However, the original R&R stopped working after I installed Norton System Works Premium 2006 with Ghost v10. IBM tech support told me this is due to conflicts with the Ghost. Then the Ghost says it has problem communicate with the USB hard disk (I did not remove the non-working IBM R&R). The Norton tech support told me this is because my external hard disk is an IDE disk in a USB box. The bottom line is that I cannot back up my disk, one of the reasons for restoring the machine.

Now I have IBM Rapid Restore v4.0 in the machine and it seems working with my external USB disk. I still have the Ghost program disk but hate to install it then see both the IBM R&R and Norton Ghost fail to work. My questions are:
1. do I have to de-install the R&R before installing Ghost? Notice you seem to have both on the same machine?
2. is the problem of Ghost communicating with the external hard disk was a quirk or I need to get a real USB hard disk as the tech support suggested?
3. do I need to do anything to use the Ghost to duplicate another external 2.5" disk with the hidden partition like you suggested for back up purpose on the road?

Many thanks in advance.

[dcouzin]

Ken Fox, I finally replaced R&R 3.1 with R&R 4.0 per your suggestion. The good news is that it seems to work OK on a T42. The bad news is that it reproduces my R&R 3.1 problem. It won't create rescue media. It gives this error message:

Create Rescue Media: Process failed.
Up to 1.6 GB of temporary hard disk drive space is needed
to create rescue media. Either move or delete files from your
hard disk drive to provide the required space; then, restart
the "Create Rescue Media" procedure.

What could cause this mistake? (There's much space on my drive.)