Monday, August 20, 2012

Sucessfully restored backup made with Samsung Recovery Solution 4 using SRS 5

Samsung netbooks usally ship with Samsung Recovery Solution, which is a branded version of Clonix WinClon. It only works on Samsung netbooks with a special recovery partition present. I have used this software once to create a backup of the windows partition of a netbook, which I had to return for repair. Since I just got my money back, I needed to decide between the same model (which was even more expensive than before, as I remember correctly) or a newer and better one. So I have chosen to buy the newer one. Although I did not know if my backed up Windows would work smoothly or even boot on this completely different system, I still wanted to recover the partition to copy the interesting files manually. However, the new netbook came with Recovery Solution 5 and did not recognize my backup files.

After some unsuccessful attempts, including trying to install SRS4 in a virtual machine (Admin Tool did not complete installing recovery environment, which may depend on special Samsung system functions), I created a backup with SRS5 and compared the files with my old backup. It seems, that there are only two bytes in user1.wcl, which are necessary for version matching. They are at 0x28 and 0x29. The backup from SRS4 is filled with zeroes at this position, while the backups from SRS5 contain the bytes ACh and 98h. So I replaced the zeroes with ACh and 98h in my old user1.wcl and replaced the SamsungRecovery folder on my external HDD with my old (but patched) backup. SRS5 now listed my old backup instead of the new one and was able to restore it. It all worked very well and Windows was even bootable (despite missing some drivers). This enabled me to copy the files (although the files left where less interesting than I believed - but at least I can now delete the backup files and free up some space).

Finally I rolled back a sector-by-sector copy of the hard disk (not made with SRS) to restore the actual state of this netbook. NOTE: remember to format (not just quick format) your disk before recovering with any backup software to avoid troubles with the file system (would have saved me some time, if I had not missed it).

Conclusion: SRS/WinClon performs very well and fast, but gets tricky if you change or mess up the system. It should be more flexible.