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Help!! 2 issues: My Documents not there in snapshot

PostPosted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 10:11 am
by Intimidator
Please bear with me.....Let me explain what happened.....my laptop is running WinXP home SP1....the owner's name is johndoe......the user name is montecore.....while logged in as montecore I made a snapshot of the system to an external USB2 HD. Against my better judgement I attempted to install SP2 and that completely hosed my system.....I thought OK lets just restore the snapshot of the system....now two things happened:

1) I tried mounting the snapshot image on a virtual drive using my desktop system to see the contents of the image....when I looked at the contents especially for My Documents there was nothing there except with My Files, My Pictures, My Videos but nothing else. Why? Is it b/c I made the snapshot under a user account. How can this be prevented in the future in case I need to recover those files from the mounted drive?

2) After loading the snapshot DOS boot disk to restore the snapshot from the USB2 drive to the laptop HD the restore process started. However it only made it only to 6 to 8% complete and then ERRORED out with SNDOS message and could not find the file header.....this happened with TWO different images in the same place with the same error....very strange. The thought this has to be some type of timing out the USB2 HD is making or the USB2 cable cannot handle this extensive transfer. Any thoughts?

Resolution: I had to buy the laptop to desktop HD adapter. I removed the HD from the external case and hooked that up to the desktop system along with laptop HD....ran the snapshot DOS boot disk and restored the snapshot onto the laptop HD and it worked PERFECTLY and recovered 100%.

Thanks for all your help!

PostPosted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 10:46 am
by Intimidator
I just found this will this allow me to see my documents when I make a snapshot of my system and then mount the image on a virtual drive?

http://www.maxpc.co.uk/tips/default.asp ... tionid=719

PostPosted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 1:37 pm
by dodecahedron
i don't see a need to use a virtual drive etc.
since you have already restored your system from the snapshot you made, all the files should be on your hard drive.
it's just a question of being able to access them, and the procedure described in the page you linked to should work.

check out this post too:
WinXP filesystem issues:security, permissions, ownership etc

PostPosted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 2:06 pm
by Intimidator
You are correct I have everything back 100% however I am trying to figure out why I could not see my documents on the mounted virtual drive? This would be a last resort to just recover these files in case the snapshot will not restore.

Afterall montecore is the admin acct therefore everything should be visible from the snapshot, right?

Well at least I thought that is what should happen.

PostPosted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 4:33 pm
by Intimidator
I am still confused on this matter. When I took the snapshot of my system I was logged in as montecore which as far as I know had administrator privilages. After the snapshot was created I plugged the USB2 HD into my desktop Win2Kpro system that has NO user login...so I guess it is just Admin by default. I mounted the USB2 snapshot image in a virtual drive and saw the my documents folder but there were no doucments in the folder.

Does that make more sense?

How can I make sure that in the future when I make a snapshot of this XP home system I will be able to see those files if mounted on a different system?