Hello,

I am new to this forum and hope you can help me please. I'll try to be brief and to the point.Just bought a new computer with Vista. It crashed yesterday and was advised to "start from scratch" and use recovery tool. Just before doing this it asked me if I wanted to backup my data. Of course I did on an external hard drive. Today I have successfully windows and running and it's new again. Now I'm ready to restore my back up files.
When I use the Vista back up file utility, it doesn't "see" the backup files on my external hard drive. When I go into explorer I can see the backup files on my external hard drive. When I click on the application file (it says it is a "restorewiz application"), it throws me into recovery manager and says, "the file restore wizard helps you restore files that you backed up earlier". So far so good. Then it says "insert the last disk. Please insert the latest disk and continue the restore wizard." There is no option to tell it to look on my external hard drive.

What am I missing? All I want to do is to restore these files which I can see on my external hard drive. They are in the folder "MINWINPC" with file extensions of .fpw. Thanks for any help.

Bruce

The solution to this problem is:

add another "0" infront of all the files from 10 on...
backup.010.fbw - becomes - backup.0010.fbw
backup.011.fbw - becomes - backup.0011.fbw
backup.012.fbw - becomes - backup.0012.fbw
and so on. Then run the .exe file that is in the folder and the recovery manager should start the recovery process. A big thanks to troy at the tech republic forums!

unfortunatley I didn't HAve any files that the soln applied to, I have files FBW.001- fbw.007, can't get them to restore, none of the sol'n posted elsewhere seem to work, please help,, wifes pics on the ext drive.

Murray

Is the first file you have in the folder a .exe file? If so, have you tried running it?

Yes I've tried renaming it as an exe file running it as is; tried moving the files to my hard drive; nothing seems to work yet.

Murray

What happens when you try running the .exe file?

Nothing happens. Have run through all the steps. Looks like everything jams up and the program just hangs there. Anymore thoughts

I haven't seen any other solution so far. For me, when I ran the .exe file, it took about 10 minutes to run. Like you described, it just hangs there. But for me, it eventually worked.

There is another thread here: Vista backup files .fbw?

I created this thread and the solution was given by the poster Troy. He seems to have knowledge about this problem. But so far, the only solution is the one he posted about renaming the files.

I am just now running the recovery mgr. but the backup files are 84 GB and the recovery mgr is trying to stuff everything into a new dir called "System Recovery files" on my C drive (50 GB total but only about 15 GB free) and of course my drive is getting full and I presume it will stop without actually restoring things to where they belong.Yep. Just terminated with an error.

What is needed is to restore the system files, application programs and files and place the system in an operable state. I'm pretty upset that HP thinks this is a production quality solution!

Had the same thing. Would not see my usb g drive. under any ciscumstances.
My back up set were stored in a .VHD format. Found out that this id Virtual Hard Drive.
Downloaded Windows server 2000 Virtual Hard Drive. loaded Windows XP on the virtual hard drive.
Opend my USB drive containing the .VHD files. Unpacked and copy/paste the missing files to another drive, and pasted into the empty drive D.
This I might add took 4 days of research and fiddling to mount drives in the virtual hard drive.
Not for the feint hearted.
John