Backup, Backup, Backup
Yesterday I got a call from my dad asking if there was anything I could do about the fact that his six year old XP machine wasn’t booting. I got that sinking feeling, and immediately headed over to see about downloading a copy of Knoppix, as it’s generally the best utility for recovering systems that appear to have died. Someone also suggested Ubuntu, which I had multiple copies of at home, so….
I didn’t intend to go over last night, so I left the Knoppix CD at work, and then when I made the decision to go work on the machine last night, grabbed a copy of Ubuntu, and my external hard drive, on the off chance that I’d have to pave the machine.
When I arrived, I powered up the machine and the external hard drive, to see where we stood. It was dead, all right, reporting that Windows\System32\Config\System was missing or corrupt. Dead registry. Great.
I rebooted with the Ubuntu CD in with the intention of backing up and reinstalling. But when the desktop came up, it wouldn’t (or couldn’t) mount the hard drive. The internal one. This was not good. Now I had to proceed even more carefully.
But at least I had a working net connection with Ubuntu running, so I headed out and tried to find some tips on recovering this train wreck. I found the answer fairly quickly (sorry, but I didn’t keep track of the URL), but it took me a fair bit longer to get it resolved.
There were essentially two solutions - copy the registry files over from the last restore point, or copy the *original* registry over the corrupted one. From 2003. Uh, let’s try solution #1 first.
After a fair bit of checking and double checking, making sure I had all the information I needed (because I obviously wouldn’t have a working net connection while attempting this) I was ready to give it a go.
Unfortunately, copying the registry from the last restore point didn’t work. The machine still halted almost immediately after the POST. I didn’t think about trying the one prior to that because I didn’t know how far back the corruption went.
So I decided to try the 2003 copy of the registry, and amazingly, the XP splash screen came up on reboot, and the machine booted into the desktop. I wasn’t quite out of the woods yet, though. All of the drivers (and things like NAV) were no longer installed. But a quick run of the driver CD, and everything seemed to be back up and running.
The next task, of course, was to back up the My Documents folder to my external drive. Something that should have been done more frequently, and hopefully will be done so after this experience.
No matter how bulletproof (or new) your machine is, please backup everything that you can’t afford to lose. Photos, documents, music. All of it. Regularly. We dodged a bullet this time, but might not be quite as lucky next time.
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2 Responses to “Backup, Backup, Backup”
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Well this is a nice healthy reminder for me since my laptop has taken to freezing A LOT…somethings off. Unfortunately I am seriously tech challenged and have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to back-ups.
Very glad to hear all is good for you there now
Oh yeah man… Backups are sometimes more important that the system itself…
I remember losing 2 years of pictures and music to a folly of mine… (I formatted the WRONG drive partition… MAN!!!)
But now caution has prevailed over my rather wild mind, and there are 1-2 backups…