Written from the kitchen table

[kinzel]

I'm writing this from the kitchen table, via Haysus the Asus, while the "big machine" in my office is going through a Windows nervous breakdown, telling me that, multiple times, that "we're sorry, Windows did not start normally" ....

This is not good news on account of I don't want to have to reinstall every single bit of software I have on that sucker in case there really is a problem ...if it doesn't route through to the desktop this time I'll move the box and push all the add-on cards, memory, and etc to make sure nothing urgent vibrated free during the overnight ...


UPDATED ...

the "return system to factory default" option seems open, but that's the pits ....
I have grabbed the most recent work on theo from the back-up drive, which is looking precious ......
sigh

Comments

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

When my husband and I had to use the "fresh from the factory" restore point, it erased all of our programs, but deliberately left anything it could identify as documents alone. Which sucks, yes, but not *quite* as badly as having it nuke absolutely everything. (Not that I am saying that you should trust it to leave your documents alone, without trying to secure what backups you can, but you may not lose as much as you fear.)

Our experience is here (http://jerusha.livejournal.com/8175.html), for what it's worth.

[zola.livejournal.com]

Did you try starting in safe mode?

Did you try starting with the disk in the drive, choosing the repair option and running chkdsk?

Is this XP or Vista? If you like, you can call and we can try some stuff...

[muehe.livejournal.com]

Probably to late for suggestions, but.
Did you try starting up in safe mode?
Before you go into any extreme measure -- pull your hard drive and copy the "important" files onto another machine. Of, course that does not help with the installed programs. I guess I am assuming you have access to another machine.
Windows does have a fix OS on the disk I have. A couple of times it fixed everything up real nice. One time it made it worse. Had to do a complete re-install.

[muehe.livejournal.com]

Did you get it fixed?

recovering xp

[(Anonymous)]

If it isn't too late look at microsoft knowledge base article 307545. This allowed me to save a couple of machines without data-loss. You will also almost certainly need 309531 as well.

Richard.