Replies

Gerald,

Thanks for your response. I hope I am able to get System Restore operational again. I “googled” ComPlus Staging and found a couple of references to Volume Shadow service and how to check it, which I will do.

I never get out of these things free. The posts here have been very informative and are appreciated.

Diane

P.S. I just checked Volume Shadow service. It was on Manual and was not started. I did so. Can’t imagine how that happened. I am hoping that was the issue. Moving along to the next step to make sure System Restore is running.

System Restore will roll back drivers. Unlike Ted, I do find system restore useful and less of a hassle than Image backup and restore for recovery from system issues. I’ve had a very high success rate in using it to quickly fix friends and family computers. He is right in that it doesn’t recover user and program data. You need a regular back up program for that,

If System Restore isn’t working, make sure the System Restore service is running. (Start orb, run, services.msc), If it is, try turning off System Restore and turning it back on. You will lose all System Restore points doing this but it should start functioning properly.
You can find a good System Restore FAQ at:
http://www.5starsupport.com/faq/vista-system-restore.htm

Jerry

Jerry, Thanks.

Thanks for the FAQ reference. I am going there now. My restore points aren’t working, so my next step was going to be to turn off System Restore and turn it back on. I will make sure the service is running as you suggest.

Appreciate your help and from the rest of the folks here.

Diane

I was trying to revert a video driver back to an older less finicky version.

I thought, and maybe mistakenly, that’s what system restore was for. I do have a backup on an external drive which is a couple of weeks old, but no full image of my system. Thanks for your answer.

D.

Thought I’d throw this in too…

Make a batchfile of the above and name it “Event Log Cleaner”.
In Windows 7 64 bit, the event viewer can accumulate alot of entries, mostly meaningless.
This batch will help to remove the entries so that troubleshooting real errors are a bit more
clear and easier to find.

Usn Journals
It is common place for checkdisk to verify Usn Journals, index files, and security descriptors to name a few. This behavior is normal.

Thanks for the fine suggestion and your help.

Diane

I think I wasn’t clear in my original post. I didn’t use system restore to remove the offending software….I did uninstall properly from within Windows and used CCleaner after to remove any droppings. I then did a restore to earlier in the day

I wasn’t prepared for the black screen at bootup after doing the system restore. I got the “system was restored successfully” as soon as I booted into Safe Mode. All was well and system operated normally except all my security software was disabled which was no big deal, but I never had that happen before. I did take myself offline when I do this stuff so there was no issue with security. But for future reference, is it a good idea to to temporarily halt things like AVAST, SAS, firewalls when you so a system restore. All these programs do scan on startup and perhaps all of them running at once on reboot caused this behavior.

Thanks.

I would run a checkdisk with the “r” switch (chkdsk /r), not from the os, but from a boot disk.
Sudden Powerfailures or loss of power during computing can leave drive errors and even boot failures.

What does Explorer say your total used Hard Disk space is?
.

Thanks for your reply.

We ran chkdsk /r. It recovered a few bad sectors, but not enough to make a difference. I asked my husband how much space he could recall he had normally on the drive. He swore it was under 20GB. Explorer told me when I looked, that there was 6.5 left of the 80 GB drive. He did some disk maintenance and removed some old restore points and got back another 6…so we were looking at 61.8 used and 12.6 unused.

We then did some exploring on the drive, looking at each folder and found the problem. We looked at the space used by each of the programs on his PC. The folder with the 60GB immediately got our attention. I am embarrassed to say that we had no idea that our security system, setup with cameras & a DVR that we view over the internet, either here over the network, or remotely when we’re away has been stuffing backups in a folder on his drive. File was cleared out and the drive was defragged. We looked at the cameras over the ‘net and sure enough, it loaded backups onto the drive. “C” now looks like it should, with only 14 GB of used disk space. We also ran another chkdsk and there are no issues except that the “Usn Journal” is still checked and verified as the utility runs, but I guess if it’s harmless and just sits there, we’ll let it be. Thanks again.