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The Windows (Vista) documentation and available online info is comprehensively vague. If I have a moderately brain dead system and want to restore it, and I have a "Backup and Restore Center" backup whose "delta" is not quite a week old (but with a "full backup" behind it), what steps do I go through to recover my box back to that backup point?

It's totally unclear whether simply doing "restore all" from the (advanced) "Center" is sufficient, or do I need to first take the box back to day zero with the system restore DVD, et al?

(Just editing this to get my correct ID associated with it.)

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  • Well, apparently with my Sony Vaio you have to press F12 during boot to get it to boot the Vaio-specific recovery stuff. Just inserting the first DVD and booting brings up a different version of the recovery menus that perversely doesn't recognize the DVDs as valid. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 15 '12 at 19:20
  • And there's a rumor that if one catches the F12 menu before it times out it can be made to boot from the recovery partition on the hard drive. I was not in the room at the right time for that, apparently. (The F12 menu spins it's wheels for awhile before giving you any options -- if it ever does.) – Daniel R Hicks Sep 15 '12 at 19:22
  • The restore process is a little worrying, because after it reformats the partition it rapidly reads all 3 DVDs, while "progress" is only 25% or so. You're wondering if it's going to ask for disk 4. But once it's read in the DVDs (probably several large CAB files) the progress indicator starts moving along. The physical restore is fairly fast (maybe 20 minutes) but then it reboots, and the post-reboot process takes awhile (still going on). – Daniel R Hicks Sep 15 '12 at 20:44
  • Well, at least an hour of churning to come up to the "set your user ID" screen, then maybe 15 minutes of alternating churn and punching buttons. Now I've started Windows Update -- no telling how long that will take, given that the image is pre-service-pack-2. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 15 '12 at 22:21
  • 123 updates to install -- I'm guessing it will reboot several times. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 15 '12 at 22:24
  • Took at least an hour to install the updates -- went out to dinner, so it could have been two hours. Now it's rebooting (which won't be quick, I'm guessing). A quandary now: Should I do anything else before I "restore all" from my Backup and Restore Center backup of last week? – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 01:28
  • Well, Windows found another 4 updates, then another 31. Still installing. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 02:09
  • And Windows found one other small update to install -- Service Pack 2. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 03:17
  • Only 67 more updates to go... Bedtime! (It's been about 9 hours so far. If I watched it closely it would likely be half of that, but still a loooooong procedure.) – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 04:45
  • Day 2. Currently rebooting from the above updates. In retrospect, I probably could have saved about 4 hours by manually downloading the [Vista Service Pack 2](http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17669) vs using Windows Update -- I'd forgotten that the Windows Update scheme is brain dead and doesn't really know about service packs. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 11:12
  • Well, after 3 more updates and a reboot, Windows Update is saying "No updates available". (I think it's getting bored with me.) So, do I grit my teeth and install the backup? (I do wish I had drive imaging software.) – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 12:01
  • Started the restore. Since there's no backup history on the box I'm restoring from a "different" PC. You get 4 layers of selection -- the drive, the backup set, the delta date within the backup set, and what to install (I selected "all"). Coming in I specified "advanced" and "restore for all users". – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 12:13
  • It's asking me (one at a time) to create users for all the different users I had on the box, and there are more than I remembered. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 12:42
  • After about 50 "replace this file?" dialogs (all answered yes), I finally clicked "do this for all". – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 13:33
  • About a third of the way done, according to the progress bar. At this rate it'll be another three hours, at least. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 14:09
  • A couple of files partially named `NTUSER.DAT{LONG HEX VALUE}.TMContai...` could not be restored, due to being in use. I selected "skip", though perhaps in retrospect "rename" would have been the better option. (And ditto for 3 additional files in my AppData.) – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 14:41
  • About 80% done -- 4 hours to this point, more or less. Going out to lunch. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 16:35
  • It's done. However, as I feared, it installed all of the data but none of the programs. So now I must install them manually. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 18:41
  • Well, I got Firefox reinstalled, and managed (after a struggle) to restore my bookmarks, but my passwords are gone. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 19:58
  • Well, got my passwords back, and my address book for Thunderbird. Don't ask how I did these, but it involves renaming odd bits in AppData. Bookmarks can be imported from JSON backups, if you hold your mouth right, and passwords and Thunderbird profile are in AppData/Roaming. (This was posted from my recovered box.) – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 23:17
  • Now just need to install Notepad++, OpenOffice, MS Office, Norton, Beyond Compare, Hex Editor Neo, and a bunch of others I can't think of at the moment. (But first I gotta find the tools for the touchpad and turn down its sensitivity.) – Daniel R Hicks Sep 16 '12 at 23:23
  • Notepad++ was a breeze. I installed it with basically one click and it found the old profile and my old set of open files is still there. Why can't they all be like that?? – Daniel R Hicks Sep 17 '12 at 00:10
  • MS Office is a minor pain. It supposedly "recovered" the existing install, but still required the registration key, and (I remember this from last time) if you mistype it you can't simply correct the error (though it pretends like you can) but you have to restart the registration process. But it seems to be installed, so I have the minimum config necessary to get my mid-month statement out. (After the statement's done I suppose I should install (shudder) Norton.) – Daniel R Hicks Sep 17 '12 at 01:32
  • Strangely, Open Office Calc has started yo-yoing -- crashes and comes back up and "recovers" and crashes again. Sigh! – Daniel R Hicks Sep 17 '12 at 01:52
  • Well, so far the thread has not "solicited" any debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. And I thought it would be useful to others to have documented here the recovery process I went through, sketchy as that documentation may be. But I'm not surprised that the thread has been closed, given the typical arbitrary and capricious nature of moderation on these forums. – Daniel R Hicks Sep 20 '12 at 00:50

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