I feel Human Again! Finally recovered my Laptop OS and files Windows7

[pmaior]

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

[Lynn Terry]

Welcome back to the real world! LOL

I *just* converted to Windows 7 - bought a new PC box to replace my older Dell with XP. I do not like change. Not at all. If it were up to me, we'd probably all still be on Windows 3.1 haha. Restoring my files from Mozy, I discovered (after the fact) how different the file structure is in Win 7. Ugh :P

[pmaior]

Ah yes I remember windows 3.1. I moved kicking and screaming to Windows 95 where they introduced the right mouse click options. IMO the best addition to the windows platform EVER.
I think you will like windows7 Lynn. They actually made the OS better this time. I am pretty happy with it so far,except for the recent crash, which may have been my fault for shutting it off manually when it would not respond. I am so impatient.
Good Luck, but I know you have a MAC book too.

[accxess]

Welcome back to the real world! LOL

I *just* converted to Windows 7 I do not like change. Not at all. I discovered (after the fact) how different the file structure is in Win 7

Lynn, I know how you feel, I was happy in XP land for a long time... you'll learn to love Win 7 it has a more consistent and intuitive approach and for the brand newbies it has many of the tools and support we had to buy in older versions.

Combined with a good backup strategy and few "cloud" tools like Mozy, S3 and DropBox etc, I think it's a huge step forward in productivity and getting things done.

So you are going to stick with Win7 and not cross to the Dark side with a MAC or just stick with the iPad?

[accxess]

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!

Pablo, what a gret tip and thanks for sharing and the reminder about how complete Win7 is compared to it's previous versions.