[Clonezilla-live] Problem with Vista's "System Restore Points" after cloning disk with Clonezilla Live

[Kevin W. Wall]

Apologies if this is on the Clonezilla FAQ, but I didn't see it there
and I am too annoyed (at Windoze) to weed through the thousands of Google
results on terms "clonezilla", "restore point", "vista", and "problem".

This past weekend I used Clonezilla Live (version 1.2.0-25) to clone 2
partitions from my 100GB SATA drive in my Vista laptop. I saved to an external
USB hard drive. I then replaced the hard drive with a new internal 250GB SATA
hard drive.

I make sure that the partition tables were the same for the first two
partitions. I let Clonezilla-Live handle this and then later I confirmed
with sfdisk before creating logical partitions on a new extended partition
where I allocated the additional 150GB and later used gparted to divvy that
up into additional partitions to install Fedora 9 and OpenSuSE 11.

I had the usual problem with booting up Windows Vista, but results that by
having Grub handle boot-up process, chaining to Vista. That still failed until
I ran some sort of "rescue" operation from the alternate Windows partition (what
Vista referred to as the 'D:' drive, which was placed there by the notebook's
OEM).

So, Windows and both Linux versions have been up and running and for the most
part, I am happy. (When I eventually completely break free of Windows, I'll be
even happier, but for now, that's not an option. Sigh. But I digress.)

Anyhow, all was good until today when I wanted to create a "system restore
point" in Vista. That runs the rstrui.exe utility. When I run that, I get
the error message:
There was an unexpected error:

The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.
(0x8007007B).

System Restore will now close.

If instead, I try to get to it from 'System Properties'
(SystemPropertiesProtection.exe), I get this error instead:

There was an unexpected error in the property page:
Incompatible version of the serializing package. (0x80070724)

Please close the property page and try again.

(And under the 'Available Disks' in the 'System Properties' window,
it just says 'Searching...'; never anything else.)

Now I know these files are there--I can see them under
"\System Volume Information\" when I mount that partition
while booted from another OS.

So, here are my questions...
1) Is this a known problem with Windows Vista (and XP??) ? I
thought perhaps they were doing something insane like *directly*
writing to physical disk blocks and going from one disk geometry
to another messed up those "restore point" calculations or something.
2) Is there a way around it? (Note: I still have the original 100GB
disk intact. If need be, I can run through this tedious process
again. I don't care a whole lot about saving the existing restore
points, but would certainly like Windows Vista to be able to create
system restore points in the future. (It does this as matter of course
when installing Windows Updates, so I think that is critical.)
3) Are there other things that are likely not to work with Windows Vista
when one clones a drive. (E.g., some brain-dead copy protection schemes,
etc. Fortunately, I don't use MS Office, 'cuz I'd bet that might be
one possibility.) Obviously I don't have time to test all the installed
software, so am looking to the community to see what I should be on the
lookout for.

Thanks so much for your answers and a great product. Surely beats
doing this all manually with dd and gzip and you get much better
compression too.

-kevin wall

[Steven Shiau]

Kvein,

Post by Kevin W. Wall
Apologies if this is on the Clonezilla FAQ, but I didn't see it there
and I am too annoyed (at Windoze) to weed through the thousands of Google
results on terms "clonezilla", "restore point", "vista", and "problem".
This past weekend I used Clonezilla Live (version 1.2.0-25) to clone 2
partitions from my 100GB SATA drive in my Vista laptop. I saved to an external
USB hard drive. I then replaced the hard drive with a new internal 250GB SATA
hard drive.
I make sure that the partition tables were the same for the first two
partitions. I let Clonezilla-Live handle this and then later I confirmed
with sfdisk before creating logical partitions on a new extended partition
where I allocated the additional 150GB and later used gparted to divvy that
up into additional partitions to install Fedora 9 and OpenSuSE 11.
I had the usual problem with booting up Windows Vista, but results that by
having Grub handle boot-up process, chaining to Vista. That still failed until
I ran some sort of "rescue" operation from the alternate Windows partition (what
Vista referred to as the 'D:' drive, which was placed there by the notebook's
OEM).
So, Windows and both Linux versions have been up and running and for the most
part, I am happy. (When I eventually completely break free of Windows, I'll be
even happier, but for now, that's not an option. Sigh. But I digress.)
Anyhow, all was good until today when I wanted to create a "system restore
point" in Vista. That runs the rstrui.exe utility. When I run that, I get
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.
(0x8007007B).
System Restore will now close.
If instead, I try to get to it from 'System Properties'
Incompatible version of the serializing package. (0x80070724)
Please close the property page and try again.
(And under the 'Available Disks' in the 'System Properties' window,
it just says 'Searching...'; never anything else.)
Now I know these files are there--I can see them under
"\System Volume Information\" when I mount that partition
while booted from another OS.
So, here are my questions...
1) Is this a known problem with Windows Vista (and XP??) ? I
thought perhaps they were doing something insane like *directly*
writing to physical disk blocks and going from one disk geometry
to another messed up those "restore point" calculations or something.
2) Is there a way around it? (Note: I still have the original 100GB
disk intact. If need be, I can run through this tedious process
again. I don't care a whole lot about saving the existing restore
points, but would certainly like Windows Vista to be able to create
system restore points in the future. (It does this as matter of course
when installing Windows Updates, so I think that is critical.)
3) Are there other things that are likely not to work with Windows Vista
when one clones a drive. (E.g., some brain-dead copy protection schemes,
etc. Fortunately, I don't use MS Office, 'cuz I'd bet that might be
one possibility.) Obviously I don't have time to test all the installed
software, so am looking to the community to see what I should be on the
lookout for.

[Kevin W. Wall]

[Steven Shiau]

[Kevin W. Wall]

Post by Steven Shiau
Kvein,

Post by Kevin W. Wall
Apologies if this is on the Clonezilla FAQ, but I didn't see it there
and I am too annoyed (at Windoze) to weed through the thousands of Google
results on terms "clonezilla", "restore point", "vista", and "problem".
This past weekend I used Clonezilla Live (version 1.2.0-25) to clone 2
partitions from my 100GB SATA drive in my Vista laptop. I saved to an external
USB hard drive. I then replaced the hard drive with a new internal 250GB SATA
hard drive.
I make sure that the partition tables were the same for the first two
partitions. I let Clonezilla-Live handle this and then later I confirmed
with sfdisk before creating logical partitions on a new extended partition
where I allocated the additional 150GB and later used gparted to divvy that
up into additional partitions to install Fedora 9 and OpenSuSE 11.
I had the usual problem with booting up Windows Vista, but results that by
having Grub handle boot-up process, chaining to Vista. That still failed until
I ran some sort of "rescue" operation from the alternate Windows partition (what
Vista referred to as the 'D:' drive, which was placed there by the notebook's
OEM).
So, Windows and both Linux versions have been up and running and for the most
part, I am happy. (When I eventually completely break free of Windows, I'll be
even happier, but for now, that's not an option. Sigh. But I digress.)
Anyhow, all was good until today when I wanted to create a "system restore
point" in Vista. That runs the rstrui.exe utility. When I run that, I get
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.
(0x8007007B).
System Restore will now close.
If instead, I try to get to it from 'System Properties'
Incompatible version of the serializing package. (0x80070724)
Please close the property page and try again.
(And under the 'Available Disks' in the 'System Properties' window,
it just says 'Searching...'; never anything else.)
Now I know these files are there--I can see them under
"\System Volume Information\" when I mount that partition
while booted from another OS.
So, here are my questions...
1) Is this a known problem with Windows Vista (and XP??) ? I
thought perhaps they were doing something insane like *directly*
writing to physical disk blocks and going from one disk geometry
to another messed up those "restore point" calculations or something.
2) Is there a way around it? (Note: I still have the original 100GB
disk intact. If need be, I can run through this tedious process
again. I don't care a whole lot about saving the existing restore
points, but would certainly like Windows Vista to be able to create
system restore points in the future. (It does this as matter of course
when installing Windows Updates, so I think that is critical.)
3) Are there other things that are likely not to work with Windows Vista
when one clones a drive. (E.g., some brain-dead copy protection schemes,
etc. Fortunately, I don't use MS Office, 'cuz I'd bet that might be
one possibility.) Obviously I don't have time to test all the installed
software, so am looking to the community to see what I should be on the
lookout for.

[Kevin W. Wall]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940970
As I really don't care if previous restore points are recovered or not,
I think I will try this before trying Steve's suggestion or trying
to use 'ntfsclone' as I discussed in my previous post today.
I'll let this group know if it works or not.

I tried this as well as some other similar suggestions I
found on Vista forums. vssadmin successfully cleared all the
old restore points and I was able to reset the size to the original
12.514GB size, but System Restore still is failing.

So guess I will have to retry original suggestion of Steven Shiau
to try device-image copy or use ntfsclone directly as I posted
earlier this morning.

-kevin

[Kevin W. Wall]

Post by Kevin W. Wall

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940970
As I really don't care if previous restore points are recovered or not,
I think I will try this before trying Steve's suggestion or trying
to use 'ntfsclone' as I discussed in my previous post today.
I'll let this group know if it works or not.

I tried this as well as some other similar suggestions I
found on Vista forums. vssadmin successfully cleared all the
old restore points and I was able to reset the size to the original
12.514GB size, but System Restore still is failing.
So guess I will have to retry original suggestion of Steven Shiau
to try device-image copy or use ntfsclone directly as I posted
earlier this morning.

Well, the first workaround suggested on the Microsoft support site
using vssadmin to resize the system restore area didn't work, but I
managed to find a site by Bert Kinney (http://bertk.mvps.org/) that
was all about System Restore under Vista. There I found that if I
ran SystemPropertiesProtection.exe, Vista properly displayed the
"available drives". Whereas originally, when doing this from rstrui.exe
would display the error message that I was getting and then show the
System Properties "System Protection" tab with the available drives
only listed as "Searching...", running it SystemPropertiesProtection.exe,
actually showed something like this:

Available Disks Most recent restore point
[ ] Recovery (D:) None
[ ] vista (C:) (System) None
[x] Recovery (D:) (Recovery) some date
[x] vista (C:) (Recovery) some date

I was able to create a restore point one the last two, but apparently
rstrui.exe tries to use the FIRST two.

So, to fix the problem, I unchecked the last two, and confirmed that
I wanted to disable system restore there. Once that was done, I checked
the first two, and manually created a restore point, entering something
like "Test to try to fix system restore" for the description. Once I did
that, everything started working.

Of course, that brings us to the reason why it had a problem in the first place,
but I believe that Bert Kinney's web site had the explanation, when it said:

If the third-party tool is allowed to runs at boot time without running
in Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) or some version of Windows
Vista, any changes that the tool makes to the disk will cause Windows
Vista, once started, to invalidate and thus delete the restore points.

Recall that at no time did I use Microsoft's sysprep tool after running
Clonezilla to copy the NTFS images from my 100GB disk to my external USB
drive, and back to my new 250GB hard drive. Because of this, Windows would
not initially boot. I momentarily ignored this, used gparted to create some
new logical partitions on an extended partition and then proceeded to install
both Fedora 9 and OpenSuSE 11.0 on my laptop's new 250GB hard drive. I thought
that I could get Windows to boot using Grub (which I prefer to the Window's
boot-loader anyway, since I can lock access with a password, etc.) Anyhow,
when I tried booting with OpenSuSE's Grub, I got much further than I did
when I tried with the Vista's native boot loader (which I had tried to no
avail *before* installing Fedora and OpenSuSE). However, Windows did still
not boot. It came up enough to tell me that something was corrupt and that
I should run my Vista recovery CD. I didn't have *that* at the time, so I
tried the OEM's (Gateway) recovery partition (i.e., the 'D:' drive). Whatever
*that* did, it fixed Vista so that Vista would now boot (via Grub). However,
my speculation is that it was Gateway's recovery action that messed up the
System Restore points. Perhaps it didn't use Windows PE...hard to tell since
it's proprietary and it wasn't exactly transparent about what it was doing to
fix the problems of not being able to boot Vista.

Regardless, everything now seems to be working OK. I may try a Windows Update--
but only AFTER I run a backup. ;-)

Anyhow, thanks for your patience. I'm a posting this just so that it might
help out someone else who encounters this or a similar problem later on, but
I am not intending to do the device-image copy using Clonezilla Live
that Steven Shiau originally suggested. Probably will use Clonzilla to make
a new image backup though.

Finally, kudos to Bert (whom I've BCC'd) for his bertk.mvps.org site on Vista
system restore. Without it, I would have stumbled around in the dark much
longer.

-kevin

[Steven Shiau]

Kevin,
Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
I believe it will help a lot when people clone vista.
Thanks again.

Regards,
Steven.

Post by Kevin W. Wall

Post by Kevin W. Wall

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940970
As I really don't care if previous restore points are recovered or not,
I think I will try this before trying Steve's suggestion or trying
to use 'ntfsclone' as I discussed in my previous post today.
I'll let this group know if it works or not.

I tried this as well as some other similar suggestions I
found on Vista forums. vssadmin successfully cleared all the
old restore points and I was able to reset the size to the original
12.514GB size, but System Restore still is failing.
So guess I will have to retry original suggestion of Steven Shiau
to try device-image copy or use ntfsclone directly as I posted
earlier this morning.

Well, the first workaround suggested on the Microsoft support site
using vssadmin to resize the system restore area didn't work, but I
managed to find a site by Bert Kinney (http://bertk.mvps.org/) that
was all about System Restore under Vista. There I found that if I
ran SystemPropertiesProtection.exe, Vista properly displayed the
"available drives". Whereas originally, when doing this from rstrui.exe
would display the error message that I was getting and then show the
System Properties "System Protection" tab with the available drives
only listed as "Searching...", running it SystemPropertiesProtection.exe,
Available Disks Most recent restore point
[ ] Recovery (D:) None
[ ] vista (C:) (System) None
[x] Recovery (D:) (Recovery) some date
[x] vista (C:) (Recovery) some date
I was able to create a restore point one the last two, but apparently
rstrui.exe tries to use the FIRST two.
So, to fix the problem, I unchecked the last two, and confirmed that
I wanted to disable system restore there. Once that was done, I checked
the first two, and manually created a restore point, entering something
like "Test to try to fix system restore" for the description. Once I did
that, everything started working.
Of course, that brings us to the reason why it had a problem in the first place,
If the third-party tool is allowed to runs at boot time without running
in Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) or some version of Windows
Vista, any changes that the tool makes to the disk will cause Windows
Vista, once started, to invalidate and thus delete the restore points.
Recall that at no time did I use Microsoft's sysprep tool after running
Clonezilla to copy the NTFS images from my 100GB disk to my external USB
drive, and back to my new 250GB hard drive. Because of this, Windows would
not initially boot. I momentarily ignored this, used gparted to create some
new logical partitions on an extended partition and then proceeded to install
both Fedora 9 and OpenSuSE 11.0 on my laptop's new 250GB hard drive. I thought
that I could get Windows to boot using Grub (which I prefer to the Window's
boot-loader anyway, since I can lock access with a password, etc.) Anyhow,
when I tried booting with OpenSuSE's Grub, I got much further than I did
when I tried with the Vista's native boot loader (which I had tried to no
avail *before* installing Fedora and OpenSuSE). However, Windows did still
not boot. It came up enough to tell me that something was corrupt and that
I should run my Vista recovery CD. I didn't have *that* at the time, so I
tried the OEM's (Gateway) recovery partition (i.e., the 'D:' drive). Whatever
*that* did, it fixed Vista so that Vista would now boot (via Grub). However,
my speculation is that it was Gateway's recovery action that messed up the
System Restore points. Perhaps it didn't use Windows PE...hard to tell since
it's proprietary and it wasn't exactly transparent about what it was doing to
fix the problems of not being able to boot Vista.
Regardless, everything now seems to be working OK. I may try a Windows Update--
but only AFTER I run a backup. ;-)
Anyhow, thanks for your patience. I'm a posting this just so that it might
help out someone else who encounters this or a similar problem later on, but
I am not intending to do the device-image copy using Clonezilla Live
that Steven Shiau originally suggested. Probably will use Clonzilla to make
a new image backup though.
Finally, kudos to Bert (whom I've BCC'd) for his bertk.mvps.org site on Vista
system restore. Without it, I would have stumbled around in the dark much
longer.
-kevin

[unknown]

<deleted...>

[unknown]

Kevin,
Yes, if you know how to run the commands,it will be easier for you to
debug and find the problem.

Steven.

<deleted...>