How do you restore files from an incomplete/corrupt Vista ..

Hope someone can point me in the right direction on this one:

Basically, we had a new Vista Business PC that was misbehaving and dog slow.
After trying all sorts of tweaks with virt mem, AV, themes, etc I decided to
do a reinstall.

It is a Asus P5LDT-TVM board (Intel 945G chipset) with a Dual Core (PD-935)
3Ghz CPU, 512Mb (DDR2-667) RAM & 80Gb SATA 7200rpm HDD. I know the RAM is a
little on the low side but I have a duplicate machine that wasn't giving the
same problems.

Anyway, I told my assistant to make a backup of all the personal files, mail
etc which he did with Vista Backup. He set the destination to the same
machine by browsing to it through the network (I'm sure some of you are
groaning around about now but in his defence, it was fine in terms of what we
wanted to do). He then moved the backup to a network drive and this is where
the problem occurs. The backup created a folder with the machine name in
which was a Media???.bin file and a folder called Backup Set blah +date,
which contains the files and catalogues. What he moved was the Backup set
folder. Then he did a complete reinstall of Vista. Now Vista Restore refuses
to see the Backup set as a valid backup. I have had a look at the files and
see that it basically created a whole string of zip files. So, I thought, no
worries, we'll just manually extract the zips. Well, cut a long story short I
don't know why MS felt it was necessary to do this but it appears that the
backup process makes zip sets and breaks large files into smaller pieces!
What a pain in the proverbial! So I have hunted the net trying to find what
process is used to create the zips but to no avail. I guess what I'm looking
for is something that will allow me to extract the zip sets or a way to force
Vista Restore to use the backup set as it is. Any of you brainiacs out there
able to put me out of my misery & save my assistant from a public flogging?

TIA

Thanks for the response Jill,

Is it not possible to perhaps fake a Mediaid.bin file? Iif that is the
problem then that is the only file that is missing from the backup set.

Rgds,

Crexis.

"Jill Zoeller [MSFT]" wrote:

> Sorry to hear about this. In general, copying the backups is not
> recommended. It sounds like you are missing your mediaid.bin file, which
> serves as a "backup label" (analogous to the volume label) so Backup knows
> what is what.
>
> The copy command has parameters for reassembling files. It's something like
> copy /b foor.bar%1 + foo.bar%2 (and so on) foo.bar. There might be
> third-party tools that will do this as well.