Windows 7 recovery can't see the external hard drive my backup is on

[lennier1]

I have a PC running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit off of a solid state drive. For some time, I’ve used the Windows backup software to keep a full backup of the drive on a WD Elements 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive (WDBAAU0030HBK-NESN). I had the computer freeze a couple of times, and then it would always just come up to a black screen after showing the “Starting Windows” animation. It would consistently start up in safe mode, but I was unable to identify any hardware or software problems.

I eventually formatted the solid state drive and reinstalled Windows from DVD. The computer now starts up fine, and all the hardware seems to be in working order. But what I would really like to do is restore the drive to its exact state on a date before I saw any problems, thus recovering all my programs, drivers, settings, etc. My impression was that this was the goal of doing a backup of the entire drive.

Before reformatting, I copied all the files on the solid state hard drive to my second internal hard drive just to be extra safe. Immediately after reinstalling Windows, it didn’t recognize the external WD drive, but I told Windows to search those copied files for a driver, and then it recognized the drive. At this point, I could go into the backup and recovery program and browse and restore individual files, making me confident that the external hard drive and the backup data is good. However, as far as I know you can’t reimage an entire drive using a system image from there.

I’ve tried to reimage the solid state drive using from three slightly different starting points–booting off the hard drive and selecting “Advanced Recovery Options” (which reboots the computer into a special mode), booting from the Windows 7 installation DVD, and booting from a Windows 7 system repair disc. In each, I was offered the same options for reimaging the drive, and ran into the same problem. It said it couldn’t find a backup image on the computer. If I browsed the files from there, it didn’t list my external hard drive at all, even though I can access it fine when booting Windows normally. It offered an option to add drivers for a device that wasn’t listed by putting in the installation media, but I don’t believe the hard drive came with installation media. Western Digital’s site said it just used standard Windows drivers. I tried saving, to a thumb drive, the drivers that Windows said it was using when booted up normally (disk.sys and partmgr.sys). The backup software could see the thumb drive, but I still couldn’t get the external hard drive to show up.

So at this point I’m pretty much stuck. I’ve got a good backup and PC as far as I can tell, but I can’t actually restore the system image unless Windows 7 can access the external hard drive while in this mode. Windows 7 backup has certainly proven to be more difficult to use than it was to set up. I’d greatly appreciate any thoughts on how to get this going.

[John012]

There are several post over the web that mention issues with Windows 7 Backup and Restore and 3TB drives.

The drive works fine on Windows 7 but for some reason the backup software does not work some times.

Try copying the image on the external drive to a different source and follow the steps on the following link:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/6618

After that you can retry to restore from the drive or restore from the other drive the image was transferred to.

[Joe_S]

I’ve seen many people having problems with Windows backup. I think you would be better off with a third party program Acronis True Image has a trial version. Macrium, Paragon and EaseUs all have free versions to try.

Joe

[lennier1]

I appreciate the link, as that’s the first thing I’ve found that seems to describe describe the exact problem I’m having. Of course, I still don’t think I can immediately solve it. The backup image is 2.44 TB, since it’s backing up my two internal hard drives, and has copies of deleted files going back several months. The backup data for just the solid state drive wouldn’t be nearly as big, but I don’t know of a way to separate out a system image for just it. So I’d need to copy the data somewhere else before formatting the external hard drive, but it’s the only thing I have that can actually hold that much data. I wasn’t planning on buying another hard drive right away, but I see that you can get 4TB ones now. I’ll post again when I see if this works.

I’ll definitely be looking into alternative backup software when I finally resolve this.

[John012]

lennier1 wrote:

I appreciate the link, as that’s the first thing I’ve found that seems to describe describe the exact problem I’m having. Of course, I still don’t think I can immediately solve it. The backup image is 2.44 TB, since it’s backing up my two internal hard drives, and has copies of deleted files going back several months. The backup data for just the solid state drive wouldn’t be nearly as big, but I don’t know of a way to separate out a system image for just it. So I’d need to copy the data somewhere else before formatting the external hard drive, but it’s the only thing I have that can actually hold that much data. I wasn’t planning on buying another hard drive right away, but I see that you can get 4TB ones now. I’ll post again when I see if this works.

 

I’ll definitely be looking into alternative backup software when I finally resolve this.

Good to know the information gave you a better understanding of the issue.

Make sure to come back and report your solution.