Vista Backup Restore external drive

[K A Hall]

I guess this has been a problem for a while but I am just now becoming aware of it and can find no solutions that works anywhere.

I have a majorly infected Dell laptop running Vista that I am going to do a system restore on as soon as I get a good backup on the users data.

So I hooked up an external drive via USB and ran the vista backup restore program. Clicked Back Up Files and was able to browse to the external drive, click next and select which type of files I wanted to back up. No problems so far it backed them all up and you can see the files/catalogs this creates on the external drive.

So before I restore the system I wanted to see if the restore feature in vista could see the files, it can't.

If you click Restore Files in the Back Up and Restore center, then files from the latest backup, then add files or add folders it goes to a default location that does not contain any of the back up files. No problem though, or so I thought sense you can browse Computer from there. If you choose Computer however the external drive is not visible. If you go to Computer from the programs menu or right click explore on the start menu or any other way you would normally view your drives they are all visible including the external drive.
So basically, before I even restore the PC, I'm unable to browse to the external drive that contains the backup set from the Back up and Restore Center. Why?

I'm using a 3rd party backup program now which will probably solve my issue but I still curious as to why this doesn't work.

If you find it via google or other you are better than I. I found lots of suggestions and most of them just seem silly and don't work.

[jdeb]

Can you see the files from another computer?

[K A Hall]

Originally Posted by jdeb Can you see the files from another computer?

Yes, I have it hooked up to an XP system and it can see the files just fine. Of course I can't use them there but it sees them. Even the PC I created the back up on could see the drive and the files any way you tried except from the Backup and Restore Center. It's like the drive isn't even attached when you try to find it from there.

The external drive and the PC are both using NTFS in case anyone is curious.