Wbadmin from cmd of a recovery disk

I was playing around with Wbadmin from the cmd of my recovery disc. Whilst it works perfectly from the cmd in the running system, I could not get it to work from the cmd of a recovery or an installation DVD.

I thought that would be neat to image a defunct system so that the guys could save their data from the imaged VHD.

The command I used is:

WBADMIN START BACKUP -backupTarget:f: -include:c:

Where 'f' is the disk to where you image.

If you have a boring moment and want to try it on your box, I would be interested if anybody could make it to work. But it must be when booting with the recovery/installation DVD

Hello Wolfgang,

I haven't played with this command much, so I'm not sure. Hopefully the links below may be able to help some with this for you.

Wbadmin

Backup and recovery strategies for IT pros

Thanks Shawn. As I said, there is absolutely no problem if you run it from cmd in a running system. But if I use it from cmd of a recovery/restore disc, it says that 'Start Backup' is an unknown command. On the other hand, you get the details if you run 'Wbadmin start backup /?'.

I suspect that the cmd of a recovey DVD cannot id the path to the volumes. But that is just a suspicion.

Would be neat though if it worked. Would be an easy way to recover user data from defunct systems - much easier than the old live Linux CD (at least for most people).

Have you already used the Diskpart and list volume commands in the command prompt at boot to verify that the drive letters are the same at boot as in Windows?

No, that I did not try. But that is a good idea.

Thanks Michael. I wonder what my problem was. I'll try again. Have to burn another installation disc. Did you use the drive letters as they show in e.g. Computer.

Michael, The idea was to make this known to the general public as a neat means to rescue their data from a defunct system. And the average Joe does not have all those tools in their arsenal that we use. But with luck, they may at least have an installation or recovery disc from where they can run Command Prompt.

I ran it with the Winows7 installation disc and that did not work on two of my systems. Tomorrow I will download one of those generic rescue discs and see whether that will give me a better result. I am not giving up yet because I do not yet understand why the cmd of a CD works differently than the cmd in the system.