Nero Backitup woes :(

mistercrabb · 20 Apr 2011 at 21:03

Hi all,
Someone I know has an old cheapo pc (windows XP), and they recently backed up the whole C drive using Nero backitup to a USB hard drive.

I guess using Nero was a bad idea?

Anyway, a few days later the hard drive exploded, so they got that replaced.
They then asked me to restore their backup for them. Unfortunately, Nero has other plans. I cannot restore to the C drive, because the operating system is running from it.

What I would like to do, is unpack the backup files (.nda files) and then manually move the documents to their proper place. That way I can avoid putting all their junk software back too, which will probably save me some grief in the future.

Any ideas?

Also can someone recommend a decent free backup tool that can backup to a USB hard drive.

Mr Blonde · 21 Apr 2011 at 00:35

This would seem to cover No1 : http://www.ehow.com/how_7526234_restore-nda-files-using-nero.html

Philtor · 21 Apr 2011 at 08:40

mistercrabb said:
Also can someone recommend a decent free backup tool that can backup to a USB hard drive.

Macrium Reflect is the best going

edscdk · 21 Apr 2011 at 08:45

best free backup program is explorer.exe

never had an issue getting files back after using explorer..

Philtor · 21 Apr 2011 at 08:49

edscdk said:
best free backup program is explorer.exe

never had an issue getting files back after using explorer..

Pardon? explorer.exe is a Windows process which provides a graphical user interface for browsing file systems.

mistercrabb · 21 Apr 2011 at 12:23

Mr Blonde said:
This would seem to cover No1 : http://www.ehow.com/how_7526234_restore-nda-files-using-nero.html

Sadly not, Nero will not let you restore a backup to:
1) The drive the operating system is running on
2) The drive the backup is stored on

I cannot choose to restore to a specific path, it will only let me restore to (overwrite?!) a whole drive.

"Restore On Original Path" from those instructions is greyed out, I assume this is because I am trying to restore to a new hard drive as the old one died.

My current plan is to use my PC (win7) to create a virtual hard drive, restore the backup to that, then dump it back onto the portable drive and put it onto their computer. I'll let you know how it works out..

Failing that it looks like I'm going to have to buy a spare hard drive.

mistercrabb · 21 Apr 2011 at 18:22

Right, that didn't work, it just crashes the virtual drive.
Next plan is to copy the backup files onto my pc, then restore them to the portable drive using Nero :/