System restore in vista

[Julsie]

I was using system restore quite satisfactorily until recently. Now when I
restore I get the following response "System restore failed. an unspecified
error occurred during system restore"
no changes have been made.
As a result I have to restore from an Image backup. I would like to be able
to use system restore again. Any suggestions?

 

[Stu]

There will be guys on here that will disagree entirely with what I`m about to
say. I`ve had the same problem with XP times past. Don`t know if MS has done
anything to improve that feature in Vista but in XP its a waste of time and
doesn`t do a proper back up of your registry anyway. When you restore it will
not, for example, replace your registry with a fresh copy rather merge old
entries with new. Thus you are left with a mess of a registry which, with any
luck, will work. If you want to truly back up and restore try ERUNT. Be sure
to disable system restore and in that way you will save some HD space also.

Stu

 

[Julsie]

Thanks for your reply. i am using VISTA and ERUNT is for XP.
My restore worked perfectly until recently. I use Ghost 14 and am able to
restore using immage but restore was faster

 

[Stu]

Vista is still based on the NT kernel I believe so it should work without any
problems. I have never been able to get a successful answer to the problem
but can only theorise it may have something to do with registry cleaners. Do
you or have you used one?

Stu

 

[Bill Sanderson]

I'm researching this--but I don't know any more than you do about it, I
suspect.

Have you run a chkdsk on the drive? File system issues can apparently be
one cause of this or similar errors.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

OK - last shot for the moment:

There's a good bit of troubleshooting information at the backup team blog on
SR, but none of it references "unspecified." There are a good many
"unexpected" errors, which usually have numeric codes attached, and those
may have specific fixes.

http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/ar...-and-complete-pc-backup-problems-updated.aspx

So--I'm still in the dark here. It appears that some antivirus apps or
suites, or some drivers (and antivirus apps count as drivers--so this cause
is probably one and the same...) can cause issues with SR. Trying the
restore in Safe mode is a workaround to this issue, so I hope you can try
that.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

A couple more thoughts:

One person who saw this error (perhaps not on Vista) reports that trying the
restore in safe mode works fine on his system.

On Vista, you can use SR in safe mode, I think in safe mode command prompt,
and in the recovery console as well.

 

[Tom Emmelot]

Hi Julsie,

I dont know why sometimes the system restore get corrupt, to put it off
restart the PC and put System restore on again mostly works fine to get
it working again.
I use it a lot but a lot of people forget to use it when something went
wrong. Hope that this helped you.

Regards >*< TOM >*<

Julsie schreef:

 

[Stu]

Correct Bill. Please enlighten me. It has always been a bone of contention in
my books and let me down when i needed it most. Which is why I`ve gone for
third party software. I`ve tried it.. tested it.. and it works...

Stu

 

[Bill Sanderson]

System restore has worked for me in the half-dozen or so times that I've
needed it on various machines. It is a pretty complex operation, and
changed significantly between XP and Vista.

 

[Stu]

You must have the Microsoft touch Bill.

Stu

System restore has worked for me in the half-dozen or so times that I've
needed it on various machines. It is a pretty complex operation, and
changed significantly between XP and Vista.

 

[Stu]

Complex it must be. So I keep asking myself. What is going on with my system
- even after a relatively clean install? Just tried it now, HD works very
hard for a few minutes then tells me it won`t be returning me to a previous
system state. Have lost confidence. C`est la vie.

Stu

 

[Bill Sanderson]

I don't know what the nature of the driver conflicts might be that prevent
SR from working in normal startup mode.

Consider making a restore point at the end of the day, installing something
off the web, then, sometime tomorrow, starting in safe mode and doing an SR
and seeing if it does what it should do--which is blowing away whatever you
installed, while leaving all your user data alone.

--

 

[Stu]

OK Bill. Many thanks for the input. Will give it a try.

Stu