backup and restore 1

[outofcontrol]

I have a Sony Laptop and I just replaced the hard drive. I reloaded the SONY recovery CD which put the operating system back on the hard drive.

Now I have a GOOD backup of the system before the hard drive crashed and I want to restore everything from the hard drive including all the Microsoft office and other programs that I have loaded

I restore the C drive and system state which completes normally; Once I reboot and sign on the system tell me that I can not run the office programs since they are not properly installed. Any thoughts??

 

[franklin97355]

Just because you have the files backed up does not mean they are installed in the OS. You need to make an 'image' of the disk for this to work.

 

[outofcontrol]

I thought if I backed up the entire pc and the system state on the pc that in the event of a hard drive failure, I could reinstall the entire PC from the backups??? Is that not true?

 

[smah]

A little more info is needed for an accurate answer. What, How, and Where did you originally create this 'backup'? And the same for restoring.

 

[Jump1ng]

If you use the builtin ntbackup you can backup the whole machine with systemstate and then restore everything.

You will not be able to just restore say your office file and get it working as its part in the registry will not be there.

To restore the whole machine like this from for instance a tape backup you will first have to install windows in a diffrent folder than what you currently using. After you installed windows you would need to get drivers for your tape backup.

Once you can access the tape do a full restore make sure to overwrite any files it prompts for, to be able to boot into your alternative windows install you need to edit the boot.ini file. Once the restore is finished reboot the machine and you should have a windows with all your programs and files.

 

[outofcontrol]

Thank you Jump1ng for the information. Unfortunately all I have is a system Restore CD from Sony so it will put all the restore (WINDOWS) information back into the directory that it wants.

Can I just overwrite all information??

Thanks for your help