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    questions about Vista Complete PC Restore

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by clyde1, Sep 3, 2008.

  1. clyde1

    clyde1 Notebook Consultant

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    Recall how Vista Business and Ultimate have a feature to do a complete PC backup.

    I recently upgraded my Lenovo T60 from a 120gb to 320gb hd. Before installing new drive, I did a complete PC backup.

    Then I used Complete PC Restore on the 320gb drive. This worked (although there are tricks involved if your pc doesn't ship with vista installation discs), except that now I only have access to 120gb of the 320gb drive. The other 200gb aren't available to me.

    Is there a way to use Complete PC Restore without losing access to the whole drive? Maybe if I had partitioned the drive to begin with?

    By the way, the Complete PC Restore operation seemed to change my bios settings. Let me explain.

    Before I did the full restore, I had actually recovered the T60 to factory settings by using the product recover discs, after which I had access to the whole 320gb drive.

    After doing so, I added a hard drive password in the bios. This was working fine. But now that I did the complete PC restore (back to a point where I had no drive password set on my old 120gb drive), there no longer seems to be a password set in the bios for the 320gb drive. I definitely didn't expect that to happen.

    Does it make sense? It's a Hitachi 7k320 drive with build in encryption option. Thanks for your help.
     
    clyde1, Sep 3, 2008
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  2. swarmer

    swarmer beep beep

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    It probably just made a 120gb partition. Go to Vista disk manager (right-click Computer > Manage > Disk management) and see if it lets you expand the partition. Another option is to create a new partition in the unused space, and just store some stuff there.

    As for whether this issue can be avoided by setting something differently in Complete PC Restore... I don't know.
     
    swarmer, Sep 3, 2008
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  3. clyde1

    clyde1 Notebook Consultant

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    Thanks, it was very easy to extend the volume this way. I extended it by 20gb for now. Now I need to decide if I want to keep a separate partition, or just go ahead and extend this thing to cover the whole drive.

    Just to close this thread, I want to give the link that helps you use Complete PC Restore if your PC didn't ship with vista installation discs. It worked well.

    http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/
     
    clyde1, Sep 3, 2008
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