Thread: Can’t excess external back up drive in hp

Working on my brother PC, it is an HP Pavilion. Did some virus scans and then installed a Seagate USB external backup drive and scheduled it to make backups one time in seven days. I formatted the drive NTFS.

Now the external has been split into two partitions, E: HP_PAVILION and F: HP_BACKUP. The E: is NTFS and F: is FAT32. The directory I formed for the back up images is left and I can't even access the F: partition.

Any hint to why this happened and how do I stop it.

When talk about you scheduled a backup of the whole drive using Acronis which in turn prepared the hidden recovery partition seen on the major drive part of the backup planned. In a sense you cloned that over to the external drive along with the operating system

The F partition is really the prepackaged files from the factory reinstalled copy of Windows having the device drivers with any software options. That remains a system reserved archive and not simply accessed.

Acronis was supposed to make an image file as a backup, like an .iso, just a different file extension and just store it on the external E: drive. It wasn't supposed to just control-c the entire original drive. as well it was setup to simply make an image of the C:HP_PAVALION partition and leave the D:RECOVERY partition alone.

I must also add that later than the backup drive was changed, his profile "Steve" was gone and he was now automatically log in as HP Owner.

Since any backup program or utility should trash anything on the major drive but just archive the files and folders it was put for with the image or other form ending up in the site it was set for. For you that would be the external drive while for the unattended scheduled backup an additional internal drive or partition at least would have been the chosen options.

Now suspect happened the backup did quite a bit more then backup. Since the goal was USB which tends to be viol tile at times the backup actually started overwriting things on the main drive for some indefinite reason like someone not connect the external drive prior to or among things during the backup phase? That could well explain seeing the recovery partition being copied over to the external drive.

Something went wrong ending with Windows taking a large hit. The finest move now would be trying to manually back up things on the external drive and set a full system restoration back to factory state.

It was likely a hardware issue. I have since performed a system restore, unluckily the inbox messages are nowhere to be found, neither is his profile

There were some viruses on the computer and only after running a total of around 7 scans with 3 different utilities was I able to clear up.

While this is primarily a machine used for his actual business, if you really think a system restore is sufficient when it comes to future protection? If the USB connection was interrupted as you suggested, maybe a UPS would avoid future issues of this nature?

To any automatic backups that you would schedule and recurrent backups especially for a business are a need you would want a large ability internal drive. Depend on how much hardware and add on devices are used you then have to calculate the wattage total and the amps on the 12v rails themselves

I end up backing the equal things up on both of the two bigger drives used for storage in case one quit and other things collected for three dissimilar versions of Windows. With any local email client one thing the owner should do is to make sure a copy is always stored on the ISP's mail server for circumstances like this as well as including the incoming mail stored nearby on the system as part of a normal backup process to avoid losses .

The restoration to the factory state is where the recovery process reformats the OS primary to see a new copy of Windows go on along with all of the prepackaged softwares and drivers. Basically you end with a system like it was just bought new as far as Windows is concerned. But the data on the drive is lost in the process. Backing up from a virus loaded drive is usually a recipe' for failure later if the new copy of Windows end being reinfected with any of the same viruses.

The remaining option for trying to recover the lost mail would be a data recovery program like Active Undelete or still trying out a few freeware to see what can be recovered as far as email is concerned. To insure all of the bugs are gone for good would require a total wipe of the drive and scans on anything retrieved to avoid any reinjection. If you can determine the Outlook files and save those then the rest is better off being wiped by the explanation you are giving.