The other day I tried recovering a Vista computer from backup. I had previously used Complete PC Backup to back up my entire system drive to a removable USB hard drive. Then yesterday the hard drive on the Vista system failed, so I tried the following procedure to recovery my system from backup:
1. Replaced the failed hard drive with a new unpartitioned hard drive.
2. Plugged in the USB hard drive containing the backup.
3. Booted the system from a Vista DVD.
4. Selected the Repair Your Computer option.
5. Selected the Windows Complete PC Restore option from the System Recovery Options dialog.
Unfortunately I then got the following error message: Element Not Found (error code 0x80070490)
What went wrong? Here's what I should have done:
1. Replaced the failed hard drive with a new unpartitioned hard drive.
2. Booted the system from a Vista DVD.
3. Plugged in the USB hard drive containing the backup.
4. Selected the Repair Your Computer option.
5. Selected the Windows Complete PC Restore option from the System Recovery Options dialog.
At that point I was able to continue with the restore process and recovered the system.
Why did the first procedure fail? It has to do with the BIOS of the computer trying to boot up first from the USB drive, failing, booting from the DVD, and then never finding any system drives to restore to.
