Comments on: Missing Mediaid.bin file

By: Arch

Arch — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:25:07 +0000

sdutil seemed to work for me when I followed the instructions. I found that after running it I had to have the backup on an external drive (not the internal D: that I really did the backup to) and the restore happened from there. The restore operation skipped numerous files in both “/program files…” and the active user’s registry file and numerous other files, as if restore doesn’t run with admin privileges.

So the easy fix going forward is to always copy out the mediaid.bin file with the backup. I just have to keep them paired with the correct backup file set, I assume.

Thanks much.

By: Art

Art — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 03:43:45 +0000

Fantastic! Worked perfectly. Also, thanks for the link to download sdutil.zip.
I wasn’t clear on where to get that file from. Microsoft website? But because you provided the link, it took care of that part of it.

By: Craig Quik

Craig Quik — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:36:03 +0000

Better than Microsoft’s support pages (not hard). Thanks a lot!

By: CGC

CGC — Mon, 09 May 2011 03:34:14 +0000

In step 3, there wasn’t any instructions to follow. And in step 4, where to find the “catalogs” directory?

By: Michele

Michele — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:57:24 +0000

Where is your backup set located on e: the root or within a subfolder on e: ?

By: Chema Sanz

Chema Sanz — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:53:02 +0000

Well, thanks for this post. In fact I get the Mediaid file with your indications, but once the Restore utility is started it still says it does not find a valid backup/restore file set. And everyting is there: the catalog, the zip files, etc.

Any clue of what might be happening?

Thanks

By: Problemas al restaurar copia de seguridad Windows 7, error MediaID.bin. Restaurar archivo MediaID.bin « Bichotll's Blog

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:07:04 +0000

[…] http://www.hm2k.com/posts/missing-mediaidbin-file […]

By: Mak Tal Oz

Mak Tal Oz — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 10:15:15 +0000

This walk-through for recreating the mediaid.bin file is spot on! 🙂 However, for those of us that sometimes tend to take things a bit to literally, I’d just like to clarify step #7 a bit to alleviate any potential confusion:

After accessing the correct drive letter for your backup, “e:\” in my case, the EXACT command I typed to recreate the mediaid.bin file was as follows,

sdutil mediaid GlobalCatalog.wbcat e:\

The only difference that should exist in the above command is the letter of the drive where your backup resides.

Again, this walk-through is very helpful, I just didn’t want anyone else to waste time making the same mistake I did (trying to run the command as “sdutil mediaid GlobalCatalog.wbcat [backup drive e:\]”). 😛

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:37:40 +0000

Thank you, thank you! I had the same problem, search Google and Microsoft and couldn’t come up with anything that would work, and was not about to call MS tech support. Bill’s comment (above) was the key – follow the steps EXACTLY. On Windows 7, right click on command prompt and run as an Administrator. Also, Windows file explorer may not let you search the backup directory, but if you use something like xplorer2, its a breeze. Once I figured out the above, the fix took two minutes and saved 500GB worth of backup. You are a lifesaver.

By: Bill

Bill — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:32:50 +0000

Once I followed your instructions “exactly”, it worked perfectly. BTW the backup was originally created on an XP machine, than at some time copied to a vista machine and by the time I needed to restore a file I was on WIndows 7. If you follow the instructions it works perfectly. Thanks a bunch!