Creating a System Recovery Disk (Version 8.5 for Small Business Server 2003)

[johncassell]

Hi all,

could some help me with creating a system recovery disk please. I know this question has been asked before but I've found no suitable answers.

I have created a backup of my system but I am reading the notes for restoring it to a new PC and it says...

--------
You should test Symantec Recovery Disk to ensure that the recovery environment
runs properly on your computer.
Note: Depending on which version of the product you have purchased, Symantec
Recovery Disk is either included on your product CD, or as a separate CD. You
should place the CD containing Symantec Recovery Disk in a safe place. Should
you lose the CD, you can create a new one if you have a CD burner.
--------

I downloaded the product from the Symantec site so there are no "CDs". All I did was create an ISO file and burn onto CD and used that CD to installthe software.

If I go to create a new system recovery disk it asks for the location of the System recovery disk - pretty pointless! :)
Any help at all will be really appreciated.

Thanks
John

[criley]

What exactly is the problem?

You can either boot directly off the CD that you burnt the ISO to. However, you may need to create a custom SRD if the standard one does not contain all the drivers for your hardware. When creating a custom SRD, you have to use the CD as the 'source'.

Hope that makes sense.

[johncassell]

Hi Chris, thanks for the reply

I thought about booting from the CD (The CD I created from the download) but the PC just didn't recognize it and booted straight into Windows as normal.

I also tried using the CD as the source for creating a custom CD but that didn't work either - it says

"The specified path for the source Symantec Recovery Disk does not contain and valid folder-and-fileset"

arghh!


John

[criley]

Sounds like either the CD that you burnt is not bootable or you have not made your CDROM first in the boot order (change this in the BIOS).

[johncassell]

I know the CDROM is before the Hard Drive in the boot order so don't think thats the problem.

I don't think I specified anything about bootable when I created the CD so I'll give that a go and let you know.

Thanks again for your help.

John

[johncassell]

Just tried that. Forgive me but Im not too familiar with boot disks here is what happened..


I burned a CD with the ISO image of my download and told Roxio to make it bootable.

It created a CD, which when looking through Windows Explorer, is totally blank. The Drive properties though, show that there is something on the disk.

I tried to boot a PC using this disk but found the error 'No Operating System'.

I tried to create a custom recovery disk using this CD and had the same error as before.

Struggling really badly now!

John

[criley]

Are you sure you have the correct download? You need 'Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5.3
Symantec Recovery Disk' which you can get here:

https://www4.symantec.com/Vrt/offer?a_id=51798

It also sounds like you are having some problems with the way you are burning the CD. If you cannot see anything through windows explorer, you are going to have problems.....

[johncassell]

Hi Chris,

Think Im on the right track now! Followed your link and there are 2 seperate downloads (one for the program itself and one for the SRD). I didn't notice that at first so I am downloading that now.

Sure it will work fine now,

Thank you so much for your help

Regards
John

[criley]

Please mark this thread as resolved once you have this working.

Thanks.

[johncassell]

Hi,

I have downloaded the ISO file - BESR853_AllWin_English_SrdOnly.iso (File size is 402,688KB)

I then used Roxio to burn the CD. At first I created it as a boot image using the ISO file with no luck.

I then made another CD with both the ISO file and the boot image on it.

When I load into machine it says 'Missing Operating System'

Not sure what my next step is, hope someone can help.

Thanks
John

[criley]

Have you tried booting off this CD in VMware? If this works - it would point to some hardware/BIOS problem on your physical machine.

I suspect that there is still a problem with the way this has been burnt though.

[johncassell · Accepted solution]

Sorted it.

I was burning the ISO file to the CD instead of the image so the CD had a single ISO file on it instead of all the many files/folders contained in the ISO.

Once I burned the image of the ISO to CD it worked straight away.

Thanks for your help

John