Recovering a secondary drive

If you lose data on a secondary drive, you can use an existing recovery point for that drive to restore the data. A secondary drive is a drive other than the drive on which your operating system is installed.

Note:

You can recover your system drive (typically, drive C).

For example, if your computer has a D drive and the data has been lost, you can restore the D drive back to an earlier date and time.

To recover a drive, you must have a recovery point that includes the drive that you want to recover. If you are not sure, review the Status page to determine what recovery points are available.

See Monitoring backup protection from the Status page.

Note:

Before you proceed, close any applications and files that are open on the drive that you want to restore.

Warning:

When you recover a drive, all of the data on the drive to which you are restoring the recovery point is replaced by the data in the recovery point. Any changes that you made to the data on a drive after the date of the recovery point you use to recover it are lost. For example, if you created a new file on the drive after you created the recovery point, the new file is not recovered.

To recover a drive

  1. On the Tasks page, click Recover My Computer.

  2. Select a recovery point, and then click Recover Now.

  3. Click OK.

  4. Click Yes.

To customize the recovery of a drive

  1. On the Tasks page, click Recover My Computer.

  2. Select a recovery point, and then click Recover Now.

  3. Click Custom to start the Recover Drive Wizard.

  4. Click Next.

  5. Do one of the following:

    • To use the recovery point that is selected, click Next.

    • Click Browse to select a different recovery point, and then click Next.

      If you need to access recovery points on a network that requires user authentication, enter your user name and password, and then click Next.

  6. Select the drive that you want to restore, and then click Next.

    If the drive does not have enough space available to restore a recovery point, press Shift and then select multiple, contiguous destinations that exist on the same hard disk.

  7. If the recovery point is password-protected, in the Password box, type the password and then click OK.

  8. Select the desired restore options.

    The options that are available depend on the restore destination that you have selected.

    See Recovery options.

  9. Click Next and review your selections.

  10. Click Finish, then click Yes.

    If the wizard cannot lock the drive to perform the recovery in Windows (typically, because the drive is in use by a program), make sure the drive is not in use by closing any files or applications that might be using it, and then click Retry.

    If the Retry option fails, click Ignore to tell Windows to attempt to force a lock on the drive. If Ignore fails, you might be prompted to insert the Symantec Recovery Disk CD and manually start the recovery environment so that you can complete the recovery. When the recovery is finished, the computer restarts automatically.

More Information

About recovering a computer