Hey guys, I searched the forums and found out that instead of running system restore, i was to use the registry restore wizard. I ran this, but the only restore point available takes me waaaay back to 2004. There are definitely more system restore points than this on my computer (I actually made one just before I broke everything fat lot of good that did!). I really do need to run system restore, and Windows won't boot at all to let me do it. Is there any way at all, or am I completely stuffed?

Thanks in advance, and great boot CD otherwise

I don't know this for sure but if you have more than one partition or hard drive, the restore points might be in the System Volume Information on another drive. Try pointing Registry Restore Wizard to that drive instead?

Tom

Cheers for the quick response. While I was waiting, I tried adding the missing dll file to the boot CD, but still System Restore doesn't work .

I do have various partitions with system volume information on, so I tried pointing Registry Restore Wizard at them, but it seems to be looking for a Windows directory, and couldn't find any restore points

There has to be something I can do lol - making System Restore not work unless windows will boot seems a bit daft to me

is this any help ?

Well, I've always hated System Restore, as it always has caused more damage (and space hogging) than good, but anyway.... have you tried it from Safe Mode? Also, have you tried booting from your XP CD, going to the Recovery Console, and typing chkdsk /r ?

EDIT: LOL mark2, I just saw your link after I already posted which shows the Safe Mode idea...

Nah - safe mode doesn't work at all, so I haven't been able to do that at all - I made a restore point just before I broke the registry, so I would have thought that there was a way to use the restore point if windows won't boot at all. Nevermind - cheers for all the suggestions Gonna wipe the thing

Are you sure there are no registry backups that you can use to get it booting?

I found the System Restore a danger. Well, I got hit by a nasty virus that hid in the system restore volumns and read that many are designed to do this. I could delete it with AntiVir, but it would "restore" itself from the system protected restore volumn. It also made an entry that I had to use HijackThis to remove that silently grabbed the virus from a domain in the old soviet empire each time I logged on to make sure it remained.

It also tried to install a dialer that would do something dubious, like phoning home to eastern Europe to get the virus again, but this portion failed, thankfully! Spybot or Spywareblaster might have prevented this. I'm not really sure. I'm very thankful I did not get a huge phone bill though.

All of this came about three days before MS released a patch. It was the "mhtml" exploit if I recall correctly. The patch was useless, as I somehow managed to get the exploit beforehand.

I would highly suggest trying to boot from your XP CD and going into the Recovery Console to try some things from there before you wipe anything. Wiping anything is the very last resort.

Well, since I keep most of my stuff on separate partitions, I just wiped the Windows partition and the software one and re-installed

It just seems really strange to me how System Restore only works when Windows is bootable. Nevermind anyway it may be something to think about though - maybe the next build of UBCD4Win could contain system restore, or a piece of software that does the same job, working on the actual system restore backups... That could be very useful, but possibly quite hard to accomplish?

I've had great luck in creating images from a clean install and restoring using UBCD4Win. Look for Lexun\DrvImagerXp.

You can create an image of your boot drive without the CD. It will reboot into safe mode to create the zip files. You do need the CD to restore ---> Presto! Way better than System Restore!

This particular program images the whole partition, so compressing, you'll need a partition 2\3's or so the size of your boot drive. If you can create several partitions to hold the images you can slowly progress (create a new set) after applying new critical updates, scanner updates, etc. and still have one that you know is safe and unexploited.

There are other image and drive mirroring programs on the CD as well. Look on the tools page here to locate them. I'm very satisified with DrvImagerXp myself.