Windows Partition Loss When You Use Complete PC Restore

If you own Enterprise, Ultimate or Business editions of Windows Vista operating system, then you can have access to “Complete PC Backup and Restore” feature. It enables you to make backup images of computer hard drive so that you could perform the system-wide restore if your system fails.

This feature allows users to not only recover their stored data and applications, but also the whole operating system onto existing or new hardware. The restoration using this feature must be done in Windows Recovery Environment.

Creating backup of your precious data is the best way to prevent data loss situations and Complete PC Backup and Restore is the best option for Vista users to do so. But sometimes, while restoring data using this method, you may face data loss and partition loss situations.

When you restore your computer using Complete PC Restore tool in Vista and use the “Format and repartition disks” option, all the dynamic disk volumes are removed and then recreated.

This process takes place even if your dynamic disk volumes aren’t included in the restore process. In this case, if your backup is not current, then you will lose your precious data that was stored after creating last backup.

Cause

You face this behavior of Windows Vista as the ASR (Automated System Recovery) process restores disk volume configuration to match it to the one which was included in backup set. When users use Format and repartition disk option, Automated System Recovery deletes and then re-creates all disk volumes.

You can avoid this issue by removing the dynamic volume that you do not want to include in the restoration process. Another option is not to use Format and repartition disks option if your disk volumes haven’t changed since Complete PC Backup was created.

But if you have already formatted and repartitioned the disk volumes and now experiencing partition data loss, you need to go for Partition Recovery to get your data back. Partition Recovery is done by using third party utilities known as Partition Recovery software.