Serious problem after restoring backup

[laurenceb]

My hard drive, unfortunately, died over the weekend. Dell sent me a
replacement. I had been planning to migrate my backups to Ghost when I
got back from my weekend trip, but obviously that was too late. So, I
have a full backup of my hard drive and system settings made with the
backup and restore utility that comes with windows.

So here's what I've done: I reinstall XP pro sp1, which is what the
system was running prior to the crash, and then I restore the backups
and system settings. After restoring the backup, explorer.exe won't
run. When I log in, all I see is my background. I can access the task
manager with ctrl-alt-del, and then use run task to run 'explorer.exe'
and the taskbar flashes for half a second and goes away again. I have
tried doing a repair install after this with no effect. Other users
have the same problem. New user accounts have the same problem. Safe
mode has the same problem. Google searches turn up a few people with
the same problem, some of whose solutions don't work, and the rest
don't have solutions...nobody seems to know what's going on, and Dell
refuses to help me...if you have any ideas your help is most
appreciated.

Thanks,
Laurence

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

You don't mention trying anything. SFC? A Repair setup?

I would use 'new task' in task manager to run:

SFC /SCANNOW

or

How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install: http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

[laurenceb]

Ooops. I've been working on this for a few days and neglected to
mention that I tried a repair install, tried sfc, tried rolling back to
the pre-backup restore point, and none of these things work
either...that's all I can think of right now...Like I said this has
occupied the bulk of my time since Tuesday, so I've tried a lot of
different things with no success...

 

[DL]

Perhaps your sys/settings backup is corrupted?
After all if its fine until you restore......?

 

[laurenceb]

I have four different backups from different points and they all do
this, I find it hard to believe they're all corrupted...but you may be
right, unfortunately

 

[Guest]

if its corrupted is there anyway to retrive it.
abdul hafezi (e-mail address removed)