evening all, Last year I made a backup of the misses laptop onto my external hard disk. I used the windows files and setting transfer wizard program to do this.

Earlier today I was after some pictures that I *hope* are included in the backup so i went to restore them but the files were not recognised displaying a message saying that "the location specified does not contain any stored infomation" - which is a lie because I can see the dat file in the USMT2.UNC folder!

I then turned to everyones friend in need google. I searched for lots of things and found several sites that listed instructions to restoring the files through DOS and a program called "fastconv"

This is where my very limited computer knowledge runs out! ( turn on/turn off and thats about it!)

I have typed in all sorts of strange "" and "/" and ":"'s but have not found a combination that works.

Can anyone offer some advise or an easy solution?

Chris

First thing to do is check the file size ---- more than possible the container file exists but contains no backed up files.

Microsoft backup programs have been nothing but trouble over the years.

For uncompressed storing archiving and backing up photos I recommend using Google's Picasa.


For general backups to external HD media (or an FTP site) Cobian back up is rock solid and uses normal zip format.

well within the USMT2.UNC folder ther are 5 files, IMG00001, IMG00002, IMG00003, IMG00004, theses files are just under 2Gb and a file called status which is tiny.

Any more ideas people?

Apparently fastconv has problems dealing with removable drives --- for more info ---
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/fast.htm

Down near the bottom of the page