Re: [Clonezilla-live] Problem with Vista's "System Restore Points" after cloning disk with Clonezilla Live

[Kevin W. W. <kev...@gm...>]

Kevin W. Wall wrote:
> Kevin W. Wall wrote:
> 
>> I found suggestion at support.microsoft.com to address this:
>>
>> 	http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940970
>>
>> As I really don't care if previous restore points are recovered or not,
>> I think I will try this before trying Steve's suggestion or trying
>> to use 'ntfsclone' as I discussed in my previous post today.
>>
>> I'll let this group know if it works or not.
> 
> I tried this as well as some other similar suggestions I
> found on Vista forums. vssadmin successfully cleared all the
> old restore points and I was able to reset the size to the original
> 12.514GB size, but System Restore still is failing.
> 
> So guess I will have to retry original suggestion of Steven Shiau
> to try device-image copy or use ntfsclone directly as I posted
> earlier this morning.

Well, the first workaround suggested on the Microsoft support site
using vssadmin to resize the system restore area didn't work, but I
managed to find a site by Bert Kinney (http://bertk.mvps.org/) that
was all about System Restore under Vista. There I found that if I
ran SystemPropertiesProtection.exe, Vista properly displayed the
"available drives". Whereas originally, when doing this from rstrui.exe
would display the error message that I was getting and then show the
System Properties "System Protection" tab with the available drives
only listed as "Searching...", running it SystemPropertiesProtection.exe,
actually showed something like this:

	Available Disks			Most recent restore point
	[ ] Recovery (D:)    		None
	[ ] vista (C:) (System)		None
	[x] Recovery (D:) (Recovery)	some date
	[x] vista (C:) (Recovery)	some date

I was able to create a restore point one the last two, but apparently
rstrui.exe tries to use the FIRST two.

So, to fix the problem, I unchecked the last two, and confirmed that
I wanted to disable system restore there. Once that was done, I checked
the first two, and manually created a restore point, entering something
like "Test to try to fix system restore" for the description. Once I did
that, everything started working.

Of course, that brings us to the reason why it had a problem in the first place,
but I believe that Bert Kinney's web site had the explanation, when it said:

	If the third-party tool is allowed to runs at boot time without running
	in Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) or some version of Windows
	Vista, any changes that the tool makes to the disk will cause Windows
	Vista, once started, to invalidate and thus delete the restore points.

Recall that at no time did I use Microsoft's sysprep tool after running
Clonezilla to copy the NTFS images from my 100GB disk to my external USB
drive, and back to my new 250GB hard drive. Because of this, Windows would
not initially boot. I momentarily ignored this, used gparted to create some
new logical partitions on an extended partition and then proceeded to install
both Fedora 9 and OpenSuSE 11.0 on my laptop's new 250GB hard drive. I thought
that I could get Windows to boot using Grub (which I prefer to the Window's
boot-loader anyway, since I can lock access with a password, etc.) Anyhow,
when I tried booting with OpenSuSE's Grub, I got much further than I did
when I tried with the Vista's native boot loader (which I had tried to no
avail *before* installing Fedora and OpenSuSE). However, Windows did still
not boot. It came up enough to tell me that something was corrupt and that
I should run my Vista recovery CD. I didn't have *that* at the time, so I
tried the OEM's (Gateway) recovery partition (i.e., the 'D:' drive). Whatever
*that* did, it fixed Vista so that Vista would now boot (via Grub).  However,
my speculation is that it was Gateway's recovery action that messed up the
System Restore points. Perhaps it didn't use Windows PE...hard to tell since
it's proprietary and it wasn't exactly transparent about what it was doing to
fix the problems of not being able to boot Vista.

Regardless, everything now seems to be working OK. I may try a Windows Update--
but only AFTER I run a backup. ;-)

Anyhow, thanks for your patience. I'm a posting this just so that it might
help out someone else who encounters this or a similar problem later on, but
I am not intending to do the device-image copy using Clonezilla Live
that Steven Shiau originally suggested. Probably will use Clonzilla to make
a new image backup though.

Finally, kudos to Bert (whom I've BCC'd) for his bertk.mvps.org site on Vista
system restore. Without it, I would have stumbled around in the dark much
longer.

-kevin
-- 
Kevin W. Wall
"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents."        -- Nathaniel Borenstein, co-creator of MIME