bobw@wdl1.UUCP (Robert Lee Wilson Jr.) (08/20/88)
I recently moved from MSDOS 3.2 to 3.3. At the same time I was changing from a 20MB Ampex disk to a Maxtor 1140. I carefully did a backup of the old disk, on 1.2MB 5 1/4 inch floppies.I had checked the 3.3 manuals which said that, although 3.3 backup can't be read by 3.2 restore, it would work the way I was doing it! (All of this on a no-name AT clone...) After formatting the new disk and installing 3.3, I tried to restore the 14 disks, named by backup as 01 through 14 and so labeled by me. Restore asked me to insert disk 01, which sounded like we were going great. It quickly skipped over that and asked for disk 00, which backup had never mentioned! I tried disk 02 (write protected!). I got a message that this disk was out of sequence, but that it would be glad to continue if I would hit a key. I did. The bottom line: After each disk this repeated. At the end of the deck, restore reported that it could find no files to bring in. I had asked for *.*. I was able to get out of this fairly easily. I just added the old disk as a second physical drive and xcopy'ed the files I wanted, and of course it was fast and didn't require floppy swapping. I.e., I was lucky. What if I had not been changing disks but had just reformatted my old drive?? Is there a real problem here, that is an incompatibility between 3.2 backup and 3.3 restore, or have I just made some obvious error? I don't have an MSDOS system or manuals or my notes here at the office, but as I recall the restore command I originally gave was restore a: c:*.* /s I eventually tried a number of variations, including adding dates to say bring in everything before next year, and so on. I would be interested in this for my curiosity, but it might be very important to someone else who didn't have my easy out! Thanks for any answers, Bob Wilson at Ford Aerospace (bobw@ford-wdl1.arpa) (Of course the usual disclaimer...)
richard@neabbs.UUCP (RICHARD RONTELTAP) (08/23/88)
The backup restore programs under DOS 3.3 us a completely different format than the previous ones, and are considerably faster. To restore your 3.2 backup, just boot a 3.2 master floppy and type the appropriate restore command. Be carufull NOT to overwrite the system files of 3.3 (you can do this with /P I think) DO NOT USE XCOPY OR COPY TO RESTORE A DOS 3.2 OR EARLIER BACKUP!!! The bachup program writes a block of backup info at the head of each file, that will not be removed when you use COPY. Richard
bobw@wdl1.UUCP (Robert Lee Wilson Jr.) (08/25/88)
Maybe I did not make one thing clear enough in my first posting. I got around the problem, I am just trying to protect someone who had formatted the disk as a part of upgrading. The 3.3 manual explicitly states that it _will_ read 3.x backups. I realize that (1) the format on the hard disk is slightly different between 3.2 and 3.3, and (2) the backup format has also changed, but MS has "advertised" that their program can deal with this. The use of the 3.2 boot and restore off of a floppy was the next thing I was going to experiment with... Thanks for saving me from having to try it. I have tried all of the things you would expect to be appropriate on the basis of the 3.3 manual, however, and none of them work. Thanks also to the people who emailed suggestions. So far nothing which involved reading a 3.2 backup with 3.3 restore has worked! Thus we seem to have a real "undocumented feature", i.e. a bug. Bob Wilson (bobw@ford-wdl1.arpa)