I spent 2 days trying to restore a new laptop to a previous state.
The Paragon Backup Recovery 2003 Free, restore CD wasn't working.
- I booted to the recovery CD or USB drive, but option 1 (normal mode)always took me to booting into Windows. The other options (safe mode or low-graphics safe mode) didn't have the drivers to access my external USB hard drives that had my Paragon backups.
Then I found, on
Paragon BR 2013 Free: Cannot restore archive - Wilders Security Forums the comment:
"If it can't see your HD and make the image then the Linux environment is likely the problem. The paid versions of Paragon allow you to create a WinPE based recovery CD which is the Windows environment and also allows any needed drivers to be loaded."
I paid for the Paragon Suite, built a recovery USB, that worked first time and in under an hour I had my laptop fully restored.
I'm posting this, in the hope that it helps others.
I have nothing to do with Paragon, nothing to gain by people buying their software. But I wish I'd realised this was an extra paid for feature sooner. The 2 days I lost, are worth more to me than the Paragon fee for their paid for versino.