Downgrading from Vista to XP - can't restore backed up files

**ggagliardi** · 10-06-2008

After fighting with Vista for months, I finally downgraded my computer back to XP, so that now all of my drivers work properly. The only problem is that I backed up my files onto a USB hard drive using the Vista Backup/Restore utility, and the equivalent XP utility doesn't recognize those files or the backup catalog. It would be a killer to restore each file manually (they are stored in .zip format).

Any thoughts on how to get around this problem? Neither Lenovo or Microsoft seem to recognize this as a problem, and so there is nothing on their sites that I can find to solve this problem.

**newtech** · 11-06-2008

Vista file backups are .zip files, so theoretically you could just extract
the files you want from each zip, though in some cases files are split
across the zips and you'd need to recombine them. The other idea I had was
to take a Complete PC Backup and store that on DVD. From XP, you can install
the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta and use the vhdmount utility to mount
the backup vhd file. The result is that your backup is mounted like a
volume, and you can pick whichever files you want to copy to your XP
machine.

Here are a couple pointers for mounting .vhd files:
http://community.bartdesmet.net/blog...9/02/4385.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy...01/734435.aspx

**nitesh mehta** · 11-06-2008

Another option - use Acronis True Image backup which permits virtual HD
mounts.

**ggagliardi** · 13-06-2008

Originally Posted by nitesh mehta

Another option - use Acronis True Image backup which permits virtual HD
mounts.

I tried Acronis, but it will only restore files that it has backed up. (It looks for a .bkb file at the start of the backup, which isn't one that is produced by Vista backup.)

**ggagliardi** · 13-06-2008

Originally Posted by newtech

Vista file backups are .zip files, so theoretically you could just extract
the files you want from each zip, though in some cases files are split
across the zips and you'd need to recombine them. The other idea I had was
to take a Complete PC Backup and store that on DVD. From XP, you can install
the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta and use the vhdmount utility to mount
the backup vhd file. The result is that your backup is mounted like a
volume, and you can pick whichever files you want to copy to your XP
machine.

Here are a couple pointers for mounting .vhd files:
http://community.bartdesmet.net/blog...9/02/4385.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy...01/734435.aspx

Thanks for the advice, but installing Virtual Server 2005 sounds way too complicated, at least for my level of technical skills. Already considered Option A, but it would take forever to restore the files one at a time from a decompressed ZIP archive.