Device Driver Information When Performing a Disaster Recovery

If you are performing a Disaster Recovery and the Client computer is Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista, you will be presented with a dialog box asking if you are restoring your data to the same computer you used at the time of your last backup (same hardware), or a different computer (new hardware).

• If you are restoring your data to the same computer, the device drivers and services from your last backup will be restored.
• If you are restoring to a different computer, the device drivers and services currently residing on that new computer will remain unchanged - the device drivers and services from your backup data will not overwrite those residing on the new computer.

When you cross computers during the Disaster Recovery process, one of the most common problems to arise is with the device drivers.   If there is a problem with the device drivers, then you may get the Windows "blue screen".

If you perform a Disaster Recovery and experience a "blue screen" on the Client computer, usually you can just reinstall Windows to fix the issue:

1. Insert the Windows setup CD and boot the computer
2. Windows setup will initially ask if you want to use the recovery console
3. Choose "No" and proceed to the setup
4. Choose "I Agree" to the license agreement
5. Windows Setup will scan the computer, detect another copy is already installed and ask if you want to repair it
6. Choose "Repair"
7. Windows Setup will delete a portion of Windows and then reinstall itself.  It will walk you through what appears to be a fresh install, but it is really only a partial install
8. The Setup will retain the majority of the previous Registry, which retains all of your application settings
9. The Setup will do a re-discovery of the drivers and reinstalls the drivers, which fixes the driver issues

Although the process above sounds like a lot of work and can be a little surprising at first, it normally produces excellent results.

Important note:  The Disaster Recovery feature is designed to restore a failed hard drive to a new hard drive as a comparable alternative.  It is not designed to be a data migration tool, nor can the Disaster Recovery perform a restore to radically different hardware setups.  (For example:  you cannot restore a hard drive that was in a dual-Xeon processor server with RAID to a single-processor non-RAID hardware setup.  To many hardware differences will cause Windows to fail.)