You cannot restore a backup from the same disk you run Windows. So spending all last night backing-up to a folder on the new disk was pointless. In the end, a clean install, followed by re-installing the core apps, a restore from “Windows Easy Transfer” to get some of the profile settings and it is working. Good old XCOPY /s/h/e/y got me through the rest.
“Windows Easy Transfer” works great for accounts that don’t exist on the new machine. But as I had created my own account at install, my mail has gone off the radar. Never mind.
So in summary, backup everything with something other than Windows Backup (even if you are just copying all your music and photos to a blank DVD using XCOPY), take a note of all the applications you have installed (and get their disks to-hand), save your settings using “Windows Easy Transfer”. On the new disk, install Vista, then your applications and get any updates you had before. Now run “Windows Easy Transfer” to restore your profiles. Recover any missing files from your backup.
Far too painful. Moral is to only trust Vista to format a bootable disk partition and to use good old XCOPY and a USB-attached backup disk to be sure you have everything rather than Windows Backup which is slow and quirky.
