Restoring Aomei Backup On WinXP

I first took a backup of my Windows XP system drive (C: in this case) with Aomei Backupper Standard (the free version) last May 2019. I had never done a restore-from-backup with Aomei before as I do not have a spare hard disk drive. Restoring to my healthy WinXP partition is an option but it seems a bit too risky for me. As a consequence, this thought had been bugging me since: Will my restore from Aomei backup work?

Fast forward to 2nd March 2020. My Windows XP kept rebooting that fine morning. The login screen never appeared. I tried mounting the C: drive from Ubuntu. It failed with an error - the NTFS file system on my C: drive was totally screwed. Only one thing to do now - a full system restore from my Aomei backup.

Restore From Backup

The restore process went smoothly. It took about 20 minutes.

No Grub Menu

Upon rebooting though, the computer went into the Grub prompt (Grub is a boot loader for booting one of multiple operating systems by the way). There was no Grub menu in sight for me to choose which operating system to boot.

I panicked.

Since I am no expert in Grub, the easiest way to fix this problem for me is to reinstall Ubuntu, I thought. And this is what I actually did. Luckily it worked and I got my Grub menu back.

Missing D: Drive

But upon booting up WinXP, I noticed that my D: drive was missing. In Windows "Disk Management", it was marked as 'healthy' but as an 'unknown partition'.

I panicked again.

I booted up Ubuntu. I fired up fdisk and noticed that my partition device numbering has changed from what I have written down previously. So it took me quite awhile before finding that my FAT32 D: drive has been set to partition type 'Linux '. That's not right. So I corrected this, booted up WinXP and to my relief, I can now see all my WinXP partitions again in Windows Explorer.

Sorry but I have no idea on why my D: drive was reset to type 'Linux'. A buggy GUI partition manager perhaps during my Ubuntu re-installation. I had problems with it once some 9 years ago, but that is another story.

[ In case if you are wondering, I have ditched Symantec Ghost as it failed me. Not once but twice when it messed up my WinXP partition table after a restore. Not sure why it happened. Too many Windows partition perhaps. I had 4 at that time - no problems when I had just one. Good thing that I can get this fixed via fdisk in Ubuntu as I have noted down my disk map before. ]