XP SP2 Restore Points Spontaneously Disappeared

pbp33411 · Joined: Dec 01, 2006 Posts: 30

This is more an advice than a request for help.

I discovered yesterday that I had NO restore points. This was shortly after I installed TurboTax. After a lot of research I realized that the restore points are gone - pffft! I created an "initial" restore point and I am monitoring to make sure that new ones are created automatically, but I suspect they will be just fine.

Here's what I THINK happened. While TurboTax was downloading (I use Getright), the system decided that was an appropriate time to create a restore point. Somehow, it got an error while processing the partially downloaded TurboTax file. The report, in the system log, reads:

The System Restore filter encountered the unexpected error '0xC0000034' while processing the file 'w_turbotax .. 9.0001.exe' on the volume 'HarddiskVolume2'. It has stopped monitoring the volume.

Of course, when it stops monitoring the volume, it deletes any restore points it has previously created. The result: all restore points are gone.

I saw no error reports on the monitor. The only reason I discovered there was a problem was that I checked to see if the restore point I created prior to the TurboTax download was there, and of course it wasn't.

So my advice is, check restore points now and again. XP will delete them without notice if it encounters any error while processing a file it presumes it should protect, and the turbotax .exe file falls into that category.

By the way, creating my "initial" restore point after the incident is supposed to have turned on automatic restore point generation. I won't be sure of that for a day or two.

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 2240 Location: Central FL, USA

I rely heavily on my own restore points, to the extent that I run a script in my Startup folder to FORCE a new restore point on every boot.

But, knowing that restore points are somewhat volatile, it's all the more reason to make regular Backups of your entire C: drive as often as possible.

I do a Ghost backup of my own C: drive several times a week.

Good Luck,
The Doctor Cool

pbp33411 · Joined: Dec 01, 2006 Posts: 30

I personally think 'several times a week' is a bit much. I do "C" drive backups about once a month, using linux running from a second drive. I never got ghost to work right for me, and until recently I didn't know you could get a free copy of Acronis.

I back up all my data automatically every night to both an internal drive and a USB drive, and once a month or so I shadow the USB drive onto another identical drive.

pasquanel · Joined: Jun 20, 2005 Posts: 517 Location: Maine

Hi pbp33411 Here's a simple tool to back up the registry before you do anything one click and your back to where you started!

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/erunt.html Cool

Alarmboy

I don't know if this might have happened when you were installing TurboTax, but if the free space on your partition fell below 50MB at some point during the installation, System Restore will suspend itself and wipe out the existing restore points to regain some free space.

And of course, it won't tell you that it did that... Wink

pbp33411 · Joined: Dec 01, 2006 Posts: 30

It's not a big drive - only 40Gb - but over half of it is free space. But more to the point, I located the event log entry from sr, as I reported above. Here's what it looked like:
[img]http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs536&d=09072&f=lost_restore_points596.jpg[/img]

Researching this wasn't the most arduous task I've ever taken on, but it sure wasn't easy. I think I was on the second or third page of google hits before I finally found a mention of the event log and that an sr event might be involved.

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 2240 Location: Central FL, USA

If this wasn't so serious, it would be funny....maybe even hysterical !!

This morning when I powered up the ol' PC, I started hearing this mechanical voice talking to me. "A ghost in the machine?"

It was "SAM", (the voice of Microsoft) voicing every keystroke. HOW ANNOYING !
The voice of the HAL 9000 wouldn't have been so bad, but SAM is really hard to understand.

After much effort I finally got him to shut up, but my volume control was somehow disabled and there was another little orange speaker in my system tray.

The problems were starting to really annoy me, so I decided to just use my trusty old 'System Restore' and go back to yesterday, when I was pretty sure that everything was working OK.

A few mouse clicks later and with a reboot, my system was back to normal and everything was working great.
The way I have things set up, I may get several new restore points every day, but that's OK, because I know I'll have a fresh restore point when I need one.
Sometimes I may have to only go back a few hours to set something right.

I've worked on PC's that didn't have a new restore point for weeks! That sure makes it difficult to 'Go Back' when something gets messed up in Windows.

Anyway, at the risk of being branded as a bad boy (again) let me just say that whatever program you might need, is available somewhere, if you just look hard enough for it.
Witness, "Acronis True Image" which is available for FREE from Seagate or Maxtor. And Ghost, which was available for FREE on motherboard driver CD's.

I've heard some say that they can't run Ghost, for some reason.
Among the thousands of programs that I've had to run over the years, Ghost is one of the easiest and most straight forward. But it's critical to have the correct version of Ghost for your motherboard and OS.

When run from a Boot disk, like a floppy (which it was designed for) or a CD, or even a Flash Drive, it runs much easier if a person will just put the mouse driver "Mouse.com" on the disk and run it from the Autoexec.bat file.

The old Ghost 2002 or 2003 cannot work with the newer motherboards, like the AMD 939 and AM2 socket types. For that, the minimum Ghost that will work is Ghost 2003, build 793.
That was the last upgrade for Ghost 2003.

And for Vista, the oldest Ghost that will work is Ghost 11.5.

So for whatever you want to do, like backing up your PC, and with whatever motherboard and OS, there is a program to do it.
Just LOOK for it.

I didn't mean for this post to run so long. Sorry about that!

The Doctor Cool

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Image URL: http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g90/DrWho1943/IQuit.jpg

tbernstein · Joined: May 16, 2003 Posts: 1668 Location: London

it's a while since I used XP, but I do recall that one big issue with it was that those restore points would sometimes spontaneously combust. You'd look, and there they were, GONE!

mommabear · Joined: Feb 20, 2003 Posts: 6325

Found this someplace a long time ago....if anyone wants to tweak their settings in System Restore.