Re: Booted Up - Hard Drive Restored to OLD State

Hi Lanwench,

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

I've found the cause of the problem and it was something simple :-)

But in my panic I thought somehow the machine had system restored itself to
its state circa Jan 2002!

The problem turned out to be that my BIOS had stopped booting my SATA drive
and reverted to the IDE drive on which I'd previously installed WinXP but
which is now just a spare hard drive in my machine.

Strangely the system restored itself to the state it was in, in Jan 2002
rather than Apr 2006 when I last used the IDE drive but once I'd investigated
the system restore points I realised what had happened.

Now I just need to fix my motherboard's corrupt CMOS but I will definitely
be heeding your warning about backups because I've realised how close I came
to losing irreplaceable personal data.

Again thanks for taking the time to reply and for the backup recommendation.

"Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]" wrote:

Karna <Karna@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've just booted my WinXP desktop and found to my horror that the
profiles on the computer have all been reverted to how they were when
I installed WinXP and set up the profiles.

This means that all the content on my hard drive (programs that I've
installed and data) have been reverted to that state too.

Does anyone know how I can restore my PC to the way it was before this
reboot please?

Thanks

Hmmm. I have to say, there is no way this can happen on a simple reboot of
your OS. Perhaps you booted from a recovery CD or partition provided by your
manufacturer and went back to your original configuration, but nothing in
Windows itself could or would be able to do this - or recover from it once
you've initiated that process.

That said, if you have an "image" based backup (such as Acronis or Ghost,
etc., can make) you should be good to go. If not, your software apps will
most certainly need reinstalling, and unless you have already made backups
of your data files, they may be toast.

That said, you might be able to recover some, if you stop using the computer
immediately and find a third party undelete program you can launch via a USB
memory stick or CD. Do not install anything on your system or use it in the
meantime if you think you will have to resort to this.

It's a sad truth that most people don't think about backups until they have
cause to regret not making them - I suggest you immediately get an external
USB hard drive and start doing this regularly. I *do* like image backups and
am a big fan of Acronis TrueImage, but you could also just do a simple file
copy of My Documents, or script something using a batch file, or use
NTBackup. Your options are myriad, but you need to do *something*.




.

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