Cobian Backup?

I have to do a clean installation of Windows 7 Home Premium because I had a problem with Windows Update and I was told to re-install Windows using the Upgrade option by a Microsoft Tech Support person. After I did that I discovered that my hard drive had been re-partitioned and the capacity of the drive was listed as being 232 GB, despite the fact that the capacity of the drive is 1 terabyte.

I looked at at the disk management page and it showed that I had a root partition of 232 GB and the remaining space was unallocated .

I downloaded a very simple partition management program from this site which automatically scanned my drives and gave me the option of reclaiming the unallocated space on my C:\ drive, so I clicked on the option and now disk management shows the capacity of the drive as 1 TB. The problem is that Windows Explorer still shows 232 GB as being the capacity of my hard drive.

A Microsoft Tech Support person told me that the only way to fix the problem was to do a clean install.

I used Cobian Backup to backup my personal programs and my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles, It backed up everything that I needed but there is no restore function. You're supposed to simply copy and paste the files in the backup to their proper locations. I don't think that it copied registry information and Program Data, so I fear that I'll have to re-install all of my programs.

It's possible for me to do so because I keep my downloads in a directory on an external USB drive, I also keep an information management program called Treepad on the external drive and I have the activation codes that I would need for retail software in TreePad. The program gives you the option to store configuration information in either the Registry or in an .ini file and I chose the .ini file option, but I don't know where that file is and I fear that it is on my C:\ drive.

I can't afford to buy a commercial backup program and after 'auditioning' quite a few freeware backup programs I decided that Cobian Backup was clearly the best program because it uses VSS to copy files that are in use. Now I'm not sure that I made the right choice.

 

You will definitely have to reinstall all your software as Cobian is a file only backup system, i.e. it cannot backup installed programs, you need to image a drive to do that. But what actually is your question?

 

Is there a freeware backup program that would copy the registry entries for installed programs, so that I won't have to do all of that re-installing?

 

Sorry, that just isn't possible. Too late now but in order to be able to restore your installed software you would have to have imaged the entire drive before you reinstalled Win 7. Something to think about for the future.

 

Then I suppose the situation is hopeless, because wouldn't a disk image also copy Windows and the the Windows reserved partition along with the partition table?

 

That's mostly correct though, providing you know what you are doing you can just image selected partitions. From the little info you have given us I suspect the advice to reinstall Win 7 without a full consideration of and you fully understanding all the pros and cons wasn't the best advice. It's an easy solution to tell ppl to reinstall - they don't have to deal with the consequences. Enquire here first next time you have problems.