Preparing for Disaster Recovery Restore on a New Hard Drive

  • Ethan K
  • Other

SYMPTOMS

If you receive a new storage drive, and wish to perform Disaster Recovery restore on it, you will need to start by initiating that drive and creating a new NTFS formatted partition on it.

 

CAUSE

Typically, newly purchased internal hard drives comes with no active partition, and in order to have successful Disaster Recovery restore you will needs to have the same file system as the original drive that the Disaster Recovery backup job was generated for it.

 

RESOLUTION

You will need to create a new partition on the new hard drive and format it to NTFS. Please use this guide to perform the format from outside the Windows environment, but please note formatting deletes all existing data on the hard drive.

  1. Download a program called GParted Live CD from this page.
  2. Burn the downloaded .iso image file once the download completes to a CD/DVD.
  3. Boot from the created CD/DVD. It will first ask you a couple of questions before entering the Live CD environment, which consist of configuring keymaps, language, and video mode. If your desired language is English, then please simply press Enter on all the questions to accept the default English settings.
  4. This is the first screen that you will see after inserting the bootable CD/DVD Parted Magic disc. Keep it with the default settings and press Enter.
  5. GParted will automatically launch, please make sure to select the correct drive to be formatted. If you have multiple drives, please use the drop-down list to choose the correct one.
  6. This is how the new un-formatted hard drive should look like with un-allocated space.
  7. Right-click on the drive → New.
  8. A Create New Partition dialog will appear.
  9. In the Create New Partition dialog, make sure to select the File system to be NTFS.
  10. Click Add.
  11. Click Apply.
  12. A confirmation message will appear, click Apply again.
  13. When the process completes, a window will appear stating that all operating successfully completed.
  14. Now that you have created a new NTFS partition, you need to mark it as bootable partition. Simply right-click the newly created partition → Manage Flags → Select the Boot option and close. This is done so after the Disaster Recovery restore completes, your computer boots-up from that specific partition.
  15. A new bootable partition has been created and NTFS formatted. You are ready to start the Disaster Recovery restore to that drive. You can shutdown the machine and log out now by right-clicking on the desktop → Exit → Shutdown the computer.

 

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