I feel Human Again! Finally recovered my Laptop OS and files Windows7
Wow what a grueling week. Since Monday I have been trying to recover my Windows7 laptop. I have Carbonite offsite backup, but I started with the tools that Windows7 has built in. Restore to a previous date. This did not work regardless of how many days I tried. Windows7 has a repair feature too. If you Reboot and hit f8 the first option is repair my computer(or something like that). You have to have a recovery partition for this to work I think (All Dell computers come with that) If you don't you can make a boot disk that has those options. (Backup and Restore in Control Panel)So none of that worked for me.
So I thought I would try to reinstall Windows and then restore my carbonite backup which , I thought, has all my data and OS files backed up.
Well the Data part was correct, but they do not back up registry files by default (still researching how to do that) So I was left with a functioning computer with no access to my programs. Yikes.
Fortunately when I did the reinstall it stored my old windows folders under a folder called windows.old.
This is where it gets really dicey. You can't overwrite windows system files from within windows, even if you are an administrator. The registry files are all in
\windows\system32 \config folder. Oh yeah Windows 7 moved the folder options that used to be at the top of the "my computer" menu, to it's own icon in control panel. That took a while to find. (You might have guessed that I hate to read the manual)
Anyway you have to enable the viewing of hidden and system files to see these.
I mention the above in case you want to manually back up these files, since Carbonite does not back them up.
This next part is only for the old time command line geeks out there.
So to restore my old windows folder I booted to a command line from the repair menu and renamed my windows folder to windowsnew and used the move command to rename my windows.old folder to windows. This restored my registry since attempts at just copying the files did not work. But I was back to square one with my windows problem of programs not running. So I copied the system and system32 folder from the windowsnew folder and windows7 was back to life again. But still my programs were not listed yet.
I found that the program files folder was still in windows.old so I copied that to the root directory c:\ Now my programs worked but they still were not listed in the programs menu. Checking again I found a folder called "program data"
copying that back to the root c:\ did the trick. Now All my programs were on the program menu. many of them required me to run through initialization as if they were just installed, so I overwrote a key windows file, but this is way better than reinstalling every program.
Well If you made it this far I applaud you because I would have bailed out after the first paragraph. :)
So Here is what I did to prevent this catastrophe in the future.
I used a tool that comes with windows7. It is an image backup of your entire drive!
This used to require a third party program, but now you can do it from an icon in control panel called "Backup and Restore" I connected a usb harddrive and ran the backup. The drive should be at least as big as the drive you are backing up.
I know this post belongs in a tech forum, but I know many people will benefit from it here as well and hopefully the techies will add to it with other, hopefully easier, solutions to this problem. Everybody eventually has to deal with this so it is best to be prepared.
Some how my firefox lost all it's links and passwords. I recovered that but that is a post in itself. Not for the faint of heart, whatever that means.
Pablo
