Patent ID: 7849353

Claim:
A method for automatically restoring a disk drive of a live client computer, comprising: obtaining a disk layout file from backup storage of said live client computer, wherein said disk layout file represents an original disk structure comprising at least one of: information pertaining to types of diskgroups present on said disk drive, types of volumes present on said disk drive, size of each of said disk drive, partition layout of said volumes, type of disk array, software RAID level of said disk array, and type of volume manager originally used to create said original disk structure, said live client computer being booted into an operating system from a system disk drive; creating a new disk structure on said disk drive of said live client computer in accordance with said disk layout file after said live client computer has been booted into the operating system from the system disk drive and before any file data has been written to said disk drive; acquiring file data from said backup storage; and writing said file data onto said disk drive.