Recovery from bare metal to beyond factory state?

[Wraithmist]

Greetings to all from a ThinkPad neophyte,

I've searched numerous threads for my area of interest, but can't find anything in quite the terms I'm after, so here goes with a new enquiry (sorry if, despite my searches, I am duplicating past posts).

I've had a ThinkPad W700 since February. I have no problem right now but I'm thinking ahead to when the HDD might die on me (2x200GB, RAID 0).

I have the following forms of backup:

a) 3 Lenovo Recovery DVDs provided by my vendor (I didn't even have to ask - not sure how I managed that);
b) A further 3 similar DVDs burnt by myself using the customary ThinkVantage tools;
c) A recent base backup + incremental backups reflecting current system state (I tend to create a fresh base backup about once a month). These backups are held on an external hard drive.

My question is - using the above backups, and without going outside the ThinkVantage toolset (i.e. not making any use of products such as Acronis or Ghost), should I expect to be able to recover my system to current state in the event that either the HDD dies or I choose to upgrade the HDD?

I think the point I'm most unclear about is whether, at an intermediate stage of recovery (i.e. either with just R&R installed or with the full factory state), my system would be able to "see" and use the current-state backups held on the external drive. I'm already comfortable with restoring to factory state (I did it about three times in the early days) and I have also restored from one of my own current backup sets, but that was all with the HDD still all present, correct and healthy.

A supplementary question would be about the pros and cons of making use of Acronis or Ghost in some way rather than seeking to stay inside the ThinkVantage enviroment. All views welcome. Thanks in anticipation.

[Harryc]

Yes, when you do a factory restore one of the options is to restore from backup.

"More than just lost file recovery, Rescue and Recovery recovers files, folders or even your entire previously-saved system image, including data, applications and operating system."

http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/think/thinkvan ... overy.html

[archer6]

Greetings & Welcome to the Forum!
I've had an occasion to use the "restore from backup" within the "rescue & recovery" environment and it was very fast and efficient. A great system that was much faster and complete than I expected as I had a full 85GB of data on the drive. I also maintain backups on an external drive so as to be completely protected.
.
Cheers...

[Wraithmist]

Greetings & Welcome to the Forum!
I've had an occasion to use the "restore from backup" within the "rescue & recovery" environment and it was very fast and efficient. A great system that was much faster and complete than I expected as I had a full 85GB of data on the drive. I also maintain backups on an external drive so as to be completely protected.
Cheers...

Ok, I'm returning to this thread that I started five months ago because I have a further question.

I've been merrily running backups via R&R during those five months. Last night I decided to test the Restore functionality. (This was a plain restore from backup, not involving the "bare metal" scenario I alluded to at the top of this thread).

The backup in question was made to both a primary and a secondary location. The primary location was the local hard drive, the secondary was an externally-powered 250GB external USB drive. I made the backup just before running the test, and then I made two attempts at restoring, both initiated from Advanced Rescue and Recovery in the Windows environment. The results were as follows.

In the first attempt I opted to restore from the local hard drive location. This was successful. In the second attempt, I opted to restore from the USB drive. This failed - the computer booted into the R&R environment as expected, but then reported "The restore failed because the backup was not found in the specified location".

My question is, "why would this be?" The USB drive was on-line when the computer exited Windows to boot into R&R environment, and it was still online when Windows rebooted after the failed restore. I should be very grateful for any advice (or any links to relevant documentation) that anyone can offer, as my findings don't fill me with confidence that I'd be able to recover current state in the event of local hard drive failure. I do appreciate that many contributors have expressed reservations about the R&R toolset, but on the other hand I do recall seeing posts from users who've successfully restored from external drives.

The R&R version in use is 4.21.0016.00.

[RealBlackStuff]

Some items to read: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 763#396899
Did you try and restore to a blank HD?
If so, check the last item on the above doc.

[Wraithmist]

Some items to read: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 763#396899
Did you try and restore to a blank HD?
If so, check the last item on the above doc.

Thanks, I checked out that resource and several others like it before I posted yesterday, but didn't find any close match to what I described.

No, the restore attempt was not to a blank HD - this was a test exercise and everything was present and correct when the restore was attempted. As I stated, the restore from the primary backup location (loca hard drive) was fine - it was just the attempted restore from the secondary location, the USB drive, that failed.

Thanks again for the response.

[Wraithmist]

Aha, after further research I've made some headway.

According to the best of my current understanding and latest findings, a backup created on a USB drive will subsequently be visble to the pre-boot R&R environment if and only if both the following conditions are met:-

(a) the USB drive is bootable (i.e. the pre-boot environment software is loaded on it);
and
(b) the pre-boot environment is loaded from the USB drive rather than from the local hard drive.

That makes sense, at least it would do in the event of a bare-metal recovery being required, which is where I came in on this thread. However, for a ThinkPad newbie like me, it was confusing and somewhat irritating that R&R in the Windows environment allowed backups to be made to the USB drive without condition (a) having been met, even though these backups were subsequently invisible to and therefore unusable by R&R in the pre-boot environment.

Any feedback or insights that anyone can offer from their own experience would still be most welcome, as I'm still researching this and would like to cover as many bases as possible before the inevitable day arrives when I need to run some form of restore live, in colour and for real.

[RealBlackStuff]

Rather than rely on the unreliable R&R, take regular images with e.g. Acronis TrueImage.

My $0.02

[Wraithmist]

Rather than rely on the unreliable R&R, take regular images with e.g. Acronis TrueImage.

My $0.02

Thanks, and yes, that option is always open, but for the moment I provisionally regard R&R as poorly documented and poorly understood rather than as actually unreliable. Having laid out a considerable sum for this machine and its software, I would - even as a private user - want a fairly solid justification for incurring extra expense on third-party products. As it stands I have (finally and after some some pain) proved that I can get a backup which I can use. The last decision I have to take is whether to go all the way and take the local hard drive back to bare metal at a time of my choosing so that I can at my leisure sort out what issues there might be in putting Humpty back together again.

Personally I would prefer to use Windows Backup and ASR (another tool that works on a well-enough basis once one has figured it out, and one which I'd already proven and got comfortable with on my old Dell), but as we're not issued with the Windows boot discs these days that isn't an option - at least, I do have the one from the Dell, but it's a Dell OEM edition and I'm not sure if it would work with a ThinkPad.

Anyway, thanks again, I am at least aware of Acronis, but I won't go there yet.

[K0LO]

In the second attempt, I opted to restore from the USB drive. This failed - the computer booted into the R&R environment as expected, but then reported "The restore failed because the backup was not found in the specified location".

My question is, "why would this be?" The USB drive was on-line when the computer exited Windows to boot into R&R environment, and it was still online when Windows rebooted after the failed restore.

I have one more experiment for you to try. My current ThinkPad will correctly detect (at boot time) attached USB devices upon reboot, but my former ThinkPad would not. It would only detect (at boot time) an attached USB device if first powered off, then powered on with the device attached. This must be BIOS-dependent.

Have you tried powering off your machine, attaching the external USB drive containing the stored backup, and then booting to the predesktop environment?

[Wraithmist]

I have one more experiment for you to try. My current ThinkPad will correctly detect (at boot time) attached USB devices upon reboot, but my former ThinkPad would not. It would only detect (at boot time) an attached USB device if first powered off, then powered on with the device attached. This must be BIOS-dependent.

Have you tried powering off your machine, attaching the external USB drive containing the stored backup, and then booting to the predesktop environment?

Many thanks for your input, but I think I detect a misunderstanding - I have never had any issue with detecting USB drives - the issue was with detecting backups stored ON the USB drive. As stated in my first post of today, I have now achieved this, but only after making the USB drive bootable and booting the predesktop environment from the USB and not from the local hard drive. Without those steps, it seems that R&R in the Windows environment would merrily write away backups that I would never actually have been able to use. Just as well I decided to check it out at my leisure. Is what I have described in line with your more experienced understanding? Is it just that R&R is maybe poorly documented, or does it seem to you that there's something wrong on my machine?

[K0LO]

No, I was only suggesting a potential explanation for why R&R failed to detect the backups on your external USB drive. If you were running Windows and initiated a reboot to start the recovery process, the external USB disk may not have been enumerated by the BIOS. Then when the machine rebooted into the predesktop environment it may have only been able to see the internal disk.

Conversely, if you start from power-off with the USB disk attached, the disk is enumerated by the BIOS at boot time, and thus visible to the predesktop environment. This is the way the BIOS functioned on my X41T - drive enumeration took place only at power-up. My current X61T will enumerate USB devices at reboot; not just at power-up.

I'm not suggesting any difficulty with detecting USB devices while Windows is running. Windows will always detect attached USB devices even if they are hot-plugged. The issue is with the BIOS and how the machine behaves in the boot environment.

This is all just a theory to explain what you saw during your experiments. I'm only suggesting giving it a try to prove or disprove the theory.

[Wraithmist]

Thanks,

Actually I do have a couple of USB drives that go undetected unless not plugged in until the host is running - but that's off-topic for this thread, because they are powered from the host whereas the USB drive I've used for the backups is externally powered. I'll try what you suggest sometime, but I'm pretty sure that there are no detection issues with the drive in question, because I use Raxco's PerfectDisk defrag tool which has a boot-time defrag option (for files, metadata etc that can't be touched while Windows is running), and this option recognises the USB drive I'm using for the backups.

[RealBlackStuff]

....as we're not issued with the Windows boot discs these days....

Go into your R&R environment and create a set of Recovery CDs. You can do this only once!
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/01/1 ... covery-cd/

[Wraithmist]

Go into your R&R environment and create a set of Recovery CDs. You can do this only once!
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/01/1 ... covery-cd/

Thanks, I did that months ago. The bit about the Windows boot discs was in the context of a comment about Windows Backup and Automated System Restore.