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restore system restore?

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by cherubcalf 1 view

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Had a bad crash; couldn't get past a minidump block that looped me back to startup; couldn't make a new partition- so, loaded XP Home over XP Pro, hoping it would be kind- and was able to recover most of the old files! However, after a lot of trial-and-error recovery from the underlying layer (it's like a mask over all the old stuff, some of which came through, some I had to reload) and a few tweaks (driver updates etc.) I now find that System Restore doesn't work at all- so the next time I crash, it may be the last for this computer- unless any of you has some bright ideas.
I also lost a big folder which I encrypted (dumb) & have tried various tools to recover; no luck so far- @ 1700 pictures are there; just can't get to them without the key, which is somewhere in limbo.
Any economical way to backup @ 20 gigs? I could divide into @ 4 GB DVDs, but am not sure where to separate (include Windows in startup etc.?)

3 replies

by deepsand

Try the "Questions" forum; the "Discussion" forum is for matters of general discussion, not specific problems in search of a solution.

Post problems such as this to the "Question" forum, rather than the "Discussion" forum. There are those who specifically seek out problems in need of a solution, and that's where they go to look for such.

Additionally there are the benefits that:

1) The "Questions" forum provides for your feedback, by way of your being able to mark "helpful" responses as such. This does not necessarily mean that a given response contained the complete solution to your problem, but only that it served to guide you toward it. This is intended to serve as an aid to those who may in the future have a problem similar to yours, so that they might have a ready source of reference available, thereby perhaps obviating the need for them to repeat questions previously asked and answered.

2) The revised TR makes it quite difficult to find both "Discussions" and "Questions" that have not had a fairly recent post, owing to some functions comingling them in the listings. By keeping each type in their respective forums, it is easier for all to find what they are looking for.

by cherubcalf

I clicked on the above and found that I have already pressed the "Ask a Question" box, so if there is a separate cubbyhole for all this, TR didn't make it clear, unless it is in the Blog box, where I didn't want to go.
I am not so much concerned about recovery at this point, as there's not much left to recover; I'm more concerned about the next time, when I might have 100 gigs at stake instead of 20. There's plenty of good programs out there which will help you find old files; the problem, it seems to me, is in making them useful by plugging them in again. What happened was a lot more complicated than what I said; I just didn't want to start by writing a chapter about it. The first crash was to my laptop, which I thought was safe because only I use it, and I had good antivirus and anti-spy-spam etc. installed, firewalls, the whole nine yards. Then I found EasyCleaner, and happily started deleting useless info; I think my problem started when I cut my startup prompts to a minimum, which made one of the large software companies mad (I'm not sure which one; I have about five candidates); because after I reinstalled I found that a malicious double minidump folder had been downloaded into my Configuration settings, which would be easy for anyone who already had access to the registry, without a spyware or virus alert.
I'm sure about this, because I copied the hard drive to my desktop trying to find the problem, and it also became infected; so I had to do two reinstalls, one which already had XP Home, the other over XP Pro.
Now comes the curious part: in both, one which was more of a repair, and the other more of a reformat, there were some programs lost; and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to what works and what becomes disconnected. In working with a few recovery programs, occasionally a random fragment or orphan file will reconnect; but with the hundreds of working files for each program, it's nearly impossible for me to understand why some made it through the reload, and others didn't. For now, I would be happy to know where the encrypted keys are kept, to see if I could recover my large folder; none of the normal procedures have worked; it's hidden much deeper than that.

by deepsand

TR would have automatically bulleted the "Question -- I am looking for a specific answer" selection. To have so clicked & still ended up in the Discussions forum would require that one change the bullted selection to "Discussion -- I want to discuss a topic."

Both the "Discussion" & "Question bars lead to the same page, but with the appropriate selection already bullted.

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