XP Restore Hell

But even then I had to strip out the drives wipe them and do a clean install of all the software involved as when it restored Windows XP that's all it managed to get working and even then only marginally.

It's not something that I would want to place some Important Data upon and trust the thing to work.

Col

I have had it work a couple of times, but I usually turn it off and install Go-Back or make an image with Acronis.
Go-Back works flawlessly unless you have a hardware problem, Acronis will work great in a network enviroment.

Hello,

I do restores/recoveries/reinstallations routinely at my job....the only time we have problems the problems track back to another underlying problem....one recently tracked back to a motherboard failing (we tried a brand new HD right off the shelf and the recovery from a formatted disk would go through the entire 7 disks of the recovery set and go to the first boot and crash). Another was tracked to a bad HD. Another was the recovery partition program was flawed, as in it wouldn't format the "C:" partition.....all tracking back to an underlying physical problem. I am however wondering if you might be referring to the "System Restore" process that just takes you back to a previous date rather than a "recovery" which is a full on reinstallation of Windows with the option to either do it by formatting/wiping out the HD or just reinstalling a fresh copy of Windows over the existing thus "refreshing/replacing" the Windows files. I personally don't trust the "refreshing/replacing" type of process. I feel that there are too many things that process can not address, such as how Windows has been changed by the installation of additional software into it for one.