Another machine another rebuild and a Backup headache.
Santa came late this year, and brought me a new Dell Latitude 820. Nice. Two 64-bit cores, a 1900x1200 screen and for the first time I have integrated Bluetooth - which works nicely with my new mouse. I put Microsoft-IT's standard build of 64 bit vista on, and all the components seem to work just fine, along with my mouse, Microsoft Lifecam NX6000 (who comes up with these names) and USB headset. My new Pentax DSLR looks like any other USB storage, however my older compact camera works with one of the built in drivers but needs an INF file to persuade Windows it. 32 bit Vista and Windows PE recognize it, 64 bit does not. All in all I have a working laptop. Since I'll lose the the second drive for my un-loved Toshiba, once I got the Dell set-up and I needed to make a backup.
When I ran backup it tells me "Your backup configuration is not valid" and gives me an error code 0x81000029.
I hate errors like this. The fact it ends 29 tells me there are 28 other errors I don't understand, and how can my configuration invalid ? All I've done is follow the defaults.
A quick search led me to Microsoft-Tech.com.
Some machines come with a partition for utilities - often labeled as and EISA config , and it's marked as the Active partition. Vista will happily work in this configuration - it puts it's boot code onto the EISA config partition. However this breaks backup. Fixing the problem requires re-instating the boot code on the other partition, so it's not for the faint hearted and you need either the Vista install disk or another way of getting into the recovery environment. If you have this then you can go into Manage Computer, go to disk and set the C drive to active. Then repair the start-up environment - otherwise your machine won't boot.
For more details see the Microsoft-tech article