Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite & USB External Hard Drive

Gday

I have emailed Paragon and am awaiting there reply, but you guys seem to know a lot more and try and solve the problem

Up to this point I have used either Acronis or Paragon for my backups, I prefer Paragon over Acronis, mainly because the restore by Paragon is far quicker.

I have both bootable CD's, but in this instance I would like to concentrate on Paragon.

I downloaded Paragon's Advanced Recovery CD. 2009 Build 6730. Put it in my rom and booted ....... looked at a black screen for 10 minutes. Removed it and rebooted, it got stuck at the loading of Vista, then I got another black screen no hard drive movement.

Rebooted again, this time with the regular Paragon bootable CD. It booted into the recovery console.

Now this is where things go from bad to worse. I tried finding my OS, after a lengthy period I received an error disk 2 i/o fault!!! ....... no operating system found.

Now disk 2 is my external hard drive where my backups are kept.

So I rebooted with the CD in, went into the recovery console and clicked on "safe restore", after playing the waiting game I get a message disk 2 i/o fault!!!.

Took out the Paragon CD, put in the Vista one, tried a repair, but there was no OS to repair .

So I installed Vista, and because I didn't want to have to reinstall all of my programs again (yer lazy I know, but that's what backup's are for).

Checked with the fresh install, that my two external hard drives, had there drivers and were present. They were both accounted for in Vista.

So put back in the Paragon bootable CD, got to the recovery console, tried a "normal restore" and once again got disk 2 i/o fault!!!. So I tried a "safe restore" same error message. Back tracked to see if my OS was still there and IT HAD GONE!!

So again I installed Vista, checked with the fresh install, that my two external hard drives, had there drivers and were present. They were both accounted for in Vista.

Put back in the Paragon bootable CD, got to the recovery console, tried a "safe restore" and once again got disk 2 i/o fault!!!. Back tracked to see if my OS was still there and IT HAD GONE AGAIN!! :sa:

So yet again I installed Vista, this time I tried copying over the latest backup to a partition that the Paragon recovery console could read.

Tried again, and yup you guessed it lost the OS again, this time the error message was disk 0 i/o fault!!!

Once again I installed Vista, this time however I installed the Paragon software, initially it wouldn't find my backups, but I was like a dog with a bone and eventually got Paragon to locate them.

This time I tried a restore from the Windows environment, crossed my fingers, my eyes and my legs, eventually Paragon said it needed to reboot to continue the operation. I rebooted, and the recovery looked promising, but I could not sit there and watch it, waiting for it to fail, so I went and watched the TV for a couple of hours.

I came back to my PC, and OMG shock horror, EVERYTHING WAS BACK! .

Now for the question, I have used the recovery console before and it found my USB external hard drives, why this time could it not?

Footnote : I also tried my Acronis bootable CD, it loaded, then the screen went black.

I have since done a backup to my external, just to make sure it was still viable, it worked without a hitch. I also did a backup on a partition, that is on a different hard drive to my OS, just in case I run into this problem again. Whether or not it will be read is a whole different story.

Anyone?

Hi,

First I am not sure of the cause but suggest it is an issue caused by the "Selected drivers" as part of the build which are installed on the bootable CD.

Do you have a menu to select which drivers are loaded at boot time?
What options are there during boot?

If you are "Imaging" the drive, I would recommend Norton Ghost, even on OEM recovery partitions.

FYI

I only use Paragon as part of a recovery process through Windows on a data drive etc....

Lottiemansion said:

Hi,

First I am not sure of the cause but suggest it is an issue caused by the "Selected drivers" as part of the build which are installed on the bootable CD.

Do you have a menu to select which drivers are loaded at boot time?
What options are there during boot?

If you are "Imaging" the drive, I would recommend Norton Ghost, even on OEM recovery partitions.

FYI

I only use Paragon as part of a recovery process through Windows on a data drive etc....

Click to expand...

No, there are no drivers to select from on the boot cd, the odd thing though, although I am now beginning to believe it was a fluke, was I did a "normal restore" using the boot cd, and vista recovered completely.

Also as I said before I have Acronis True Image 2011 with the Plus Pack, which allows you to make a Winpe boot cd.

Because of the lack of support at Acronis I asked in the forums there, if the Acronis Winpe boot cd was like the Paragon Winpe cd, which allows you to do a bare metal backup (I have seen a Win7 video tutorial), I got told to "try it" .. so I did ...and once again tata OS.

This time I simply re installed vista using my disk, put the Paragon recovery software on it and recovered everything in under 1 hour (including the re install of the OS) :D

I am just confused as to why all of a sudden none of my bootable recovery cd's will work