Hi all,
Does someone knows of an equivalent of Sysinternals ERD (Emergency Recovery Disk ?) that was able to restore data offline on a XP machine from the System Restore data. I have ERD 5.0 but it won't work with the system I am trying to repair, saying the OS is XP Pro SP3, unsupported...
Thanks.
I'll be honest. The SysInternals utilities are good stuff. If it doesn't work I would say that there are bigger problems. However, you can restore from the Recovery Console on a Win XP CD. It just takes a while to manually type all the commands at the CMD prompt.
The main feature of System Restore is backup/restoring the registry. You can also use [url=http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm:37ujpbah]UBCD[/url:37ujpbah] which has a wizard that will walk you through the process.
Thanks. Actually I already tried something with UBCD4win, but this had made the situation worse. I don't know why, maybe it's EZPCFix which is provided with UBCD, but after trying a few tools, the NTFS filesystem was seriously damaged and chkdsk took quite some time fixing it, and probably some important files were damaged. I am 100% sure it was not damaged before UBCD, I tested it with another bootable CD (an old BartPE) with a chkdsk that was Ok at that time.
I have also tried the recovery console, but the trouble is that beyond fixboot & fixmbr commands, I don't know what else to try. Someone pointed me another way to explore : boot in command line mode and try system restore from there, which is apparently feasible. I'll try that, but I am almost certain the system will hang before reaching the CLI.
Beyond that, the only options left seems either a clean windows install or an install over the previous version.
Regarding ERD, I found something more: I was able to get a full version, not the eval one, but the result was the same. Then I also used the ERD CD on a working XP home machine (SP2), and this time also, ERD recognized the system as XP Pro, not Home, but accepted to load.
I'll report here when this is done.
Restoring the registry from the Recovery Console is a PITA. I'll point you to the [url=http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545:iq2s3xfi]MS KB article[/url:iq2s3xfi] if you want to have a go at it.
If the contents of the drive are damaged I doubt it will be of much help though. Hopefully not! Let us know what happens.
[quote="DavesComputerTips":1nxhvcat]Restoring the registry from the Recovery Console is a PITA. I'll point you to the [url=http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545:1nxhvcat]MS KB article[/url:1nxhvcat] if you want to have a go at it.
If the contents of the drive are damaged I doubt it will be of much help though. Hopefully not! Let us know what happens.[/quote:1nxhvcat]
Actually, with the ERD tool, and the MSFT KB article, it seems quite feasible, but I begin to think that some essential files within windowssystem32 are damaged, not only the Registry. Anyway, I will pursue some experiments...
Thanks for your help !
Hi,
I was able to restore the registry, and also use ERD, but it didn't repair XP, which was too much damaged. I have hence decided to use the XP re-installation CD.
Well, at least I tried...
Thanks for the help.
You gave it a valiant effort and that's all you can do!
Sometimes it's just easier to go the repair installation or reinstall route from the get go. Unfortunately I'm hard headed and usually do things the hard way, but that's how you learn (at least that's what I tell myself).
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