How long should a System Restore take?

After experiencing consistent blue screen crashes when opening TuroCAD (and BS crashes in another PCB layout program), and after downloading Blue Screen View (which bascially told me nothing except that the BS occurs consistently in ntoskrnl.exe), and after updating my video drivers to the latest version, and after running (3 times) extended memory testing on my 4 GB DDR3 (an overnight process showing no problems), and after running a full HDD scan/repair on my 1TB HDD (a second overnight process, showing no problems), I decided to buy another 1TB HDD and attempt to restore my system to the new drive.

So, I make a System Image on an external 500GB USB HDD. I install my new 1TB HDD beside my original tTB drive, which is still working, so far.

I then try to run WinRE from a recovery disk, but I get an error saying "This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible with the version of Windows". After re-trying several times and searching for hours for others with my pain, I find out that you must disconnect your external USB HDD before Windows Restore will work! After simply disconnecting my USB drive the WinRE will start, but cannot find my new HDD....because I had to disconnect it for WinRE to run!

Soooo.... I decided to bite the bullet and try to recover from my external image file back to my old (blue screen prone) HDD. WinRE appears to be working.....and working.....and working........

It's been ~4 hours and the blue progress bar is at ~10-15% complete. At this rate the restore process will take about 30-40 hours!! This is for a 122GB restore file.

Am I stupid?
Am I totally wrong in my approach?
Am I wrong to think I should just trash the entire system and buy another on from Micro Center for ~$700? That would sure be a LOT less expensive than the time I have invested in trying to "restore" my system. I have a business to run and have lost several days pursuing what appears to be a never-ending ....wait... for something to work properly.

/rant

Sorry, whew! Now I feel better.

Any guidance you guys can provide would be much appreciated.

That is a normal time for the size of your HDD image, especially considering the fact that it has to be read from a slow 500GB USB-powered HDD, extracted, converted, and copied to the next HDD. If it has started to go into the 2-day mark, then you can start to worry. Just let it go and post back if you have any concerns.

-techhead287

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techhead287 said:

That is a normal time for the size of your HDD image,

Thanks. I never would have expected this.

However, I gave up anyway since I couldn't be sure the restore was going to work after all that time (see below)

whs said:

What imaging program are you using. If it is Windows imaging anything can happen - but usually nothing good.

I image with free Macrium. My restores usually take 20 minutes from a 35GB image. Your image is bigger so I would guess 1 hour would be appropriate.

If it is a Windows image, post back and I tell you what to do.

I am using Windows imaging. However, I gave up since there wasn't any way to verify that, after waiting 2+ days, everything would restore properly.

So, I decided to reload Windows and start over (reloading all of my programs again). I then ran into a glitch with the RAID vs IDE vs AHCI settings in BIOS since the new drive appears to have a different storage format than the old drive. After changing my BIOS settings to IDE I was able to successfully load Windows again.

From there I am doing a Windows restore of my last backup. Since I can selectively restore folder by folder, I can monitor the progress of the restore.

If Macrium can really do this in an hour I would be surprised. But I will (as an insurance policy) give it a try next time.

Thanks for the thoughts guys!!

Mike

Ok folks. Here's the answer!

I found out (by looking at my Task Manager-> Resource Monitor) that my NAS storage device, even though connected via a GB Ethernet connection, was trickling along a 10Mb/s (yes, that's 10 million BITS per second) during file transfers (restore session). Unfortunately, my DLINK DNS-321 (which is about 6 years old, ancient in Tech-years) is THE bottleneck in my system.

If you look at the numbers:

My restore file size = 122GB
My network bottleneck = 10Mb/s ~=1.25MB/sec
So total transfer time = (122,000/1.25)seconds = 97600 seconds/3600 seconds per hour = 27 hours!

So I'm off to Micro Center for find a newer NAS.

Again, thanks for the feedback.

MikeH