Restoring from My Passport to Recovered PC

Portable Drives My Passport
1

I just fully recovered my laptop to its initial state.  I installed the My Passport drive and started the WD Smartware.  When I went to the retrieve tab, however, I found I was unable to restore files to “Original Places”.  The drive treats the PC as brand new, asking to perform an initial backup, etc.  The PC is named as before, the drive letter is the same, etc. What do I need to do to retrieve and get back ups going again?

Thanks for your help.

2

what do you mean by “fully recovered”?  if you basically reinstalled the os, then smartware won’t recognize the drive and original backup.  it’s logically a different computer.  you will have to retrieve that backup to a folder, and sort the files.  then you will have to create a new backup. 

3

I basically had the same problem and retrieved the data to a new folder but it looks like the bulk of my data went into a “memory.dmp” dump file that I can’t open. Is there a way to open up the backup file and retrieve individual files without retrieving the whole thing?  Bruce