Yes, you can restore single partitions with the restore CD.
Richard, Olaf, KCXLT, and Kariya21,
I'm fixed, but I had to do it the hard way: Remove the client computer from the WHS environment and re-add it. For me, that was a scary proposition. Even though I've never had a
sudden and
total failure of a hard drive in all my 20-plus years of using them, wiping out my only backup while preparing another one was a scary proposition.
Uninstalling the Connector software from my client and re-installing it still would not allow WHS to accept my new hard drive that I use as my data volume. I wonder whether it would have worked if I removed the old drive from the backup configuration at any time prior to installing the new drive.
I'm a former Solaris/UNIX sys admin and if I hadn't gotten so flustered, I would have made excellent notes about my experience to share with you. However, when I get frustrated as I began to get, I started to try "undocumented/unsupported" ideas that you'd consider risky, perhaps, and that's when I stopped taking notes.
On my system (a fully updated Vista Home Premium system), some software that I install actually installs properly, but after clicking the Finish button for the program's installer, I occasionally get a Windows message saying the installation failed, and that was exactly the case each time I installed the WHS Connector software; it was a major distraction and annoyance since it seems the Connector actually was properly installing.
Here's one odd thing ... After removing the WHS Connector from the client and removing the client from WHS, I was not able to re-install the Connector software from the WHS server. I used the CD that came with my HP EX470 and then I re-added the client to WHS; that new backup took a really long time, of course, but initially there was no problem.
However, for that initial backup, I intentionally did not include my data volume, Drive F:. After the initial backup of C: and D: (my system's factory configuration partition) completed, I made some adjustments to the arrangement of my data. Then I reconfigured the backup to include F: (my data volume) and proceeded to perform another backup. These backups repeatedly failed with this message:
Backup failed because your computer restarted while the backup was running . That's not true, though; I was actually running the Console on the system being backed up. The backup worked properly for D: (the factory configuration partition), but the backup was dying as it was examining C: for changed sectors.
That consistent behavior (it died the same way three times) gave me no clues, but through some things I've read, I realized that if the Connector software is not the most current version, this might be the cause. The error msg included a link to where I could download WHSConnectorInstall.exe, and re-install the current version did the trick.
I know it's easier said than done, but non-savvy users (that includes me) might not be so keenly aware that these two components (the Connector and WHS itself) are separate, nor would they necessarily realize that one sits on the client and the other is on the server. Even though I know "enough to be dangerous," I forget that myself sometimes. In plain language, I'm simply saying that I wish using WHS were not so tricky.
Note, also, that I use WHS
only for local backups. I haven't tried any remote backups, I don't have any shares, etc ... Only backups. I suspect that WHS might be far more popular if it weren't so tricky to use. I also am seriously disappointed by realizing that installing a new hard drive would cause as many problems for me as it did. I surely realize it might not be fair for me to expect WHS to be as foolproof as using a fork and spoon, but in my humble opinion, it's presently much more complicated than it ought to be.
I thank you all for your help. I'm back on track, for now, but I surely hope to not have difficulties like that any time soon. Thank you again, folks. I
sincerely appreciate all your help. Have a good one!
Tony
