Vista - System Restore - taking too long?

Hi Guys

I have looked through the discussions and run the tutorial and not found anything to help me!

I was trying to do a system restore – I went through the normal steps, (may be that was a mistake to start with!! ) clicked on “restore to an earlier date" and selected 24 Aug. 30 hours later the restore is still running –the green line is still going across the bottom of the screen. Not sure what to do now – If I pull the plug on the PC what will or might happen?

I have a HP Pavillion Elite M9351 with Vista Ultimate 64

thanks
Neil

Hi Neil,

System Restore can be a bit slow at times, but is generally able to complete its task within 15 minutes. 30 hours is a bit on the extreme side and would point to a corrupt restore point or even a corrupt system file. It could also indicate serious problems with your hard drive. You could also try running an SFC check System Files - SFC Command, but the chances are that your system is corrupt. I would be inclined to reinstall Vista either from your recovery discs or from the recovery partition which is available after the BIOS has finished its POST (see manual for details).

Hello Neil, welcome to Vista forums!

I have done many "System Restores" and it usually finishes and re-boots in less than ten minutes.

If Dwarf's suggestion about "SFC" doesn't sort it out for you, then have a look at this.
Below are the directions to do a "Factory Recovery" directly from the "Recovery" partition
added by HP at the factory.
Be advised that it will bring the machine back to the point you first took it of the box.

HP Recovery Center

The "HP Recovery Center" will give you the option to send to backup anything you
don't want to lose, so have backup media available to use if you choose this option.

With the machine off press the power button, as soon as you do that start tapping the F11 key.
That should take you to the HP Recovery Center. When there just follow the prompts.
It is pretty much self explanatory. From the time you boot into F11 (not counting
any backups you choose to make) you should be back on a working desktop in about
30 minutes. After it restarts just follow the prompts again to finish the process.

If your first option is system restore select no, which should take you to system recovery.
You want to try system recovery not system restore, unless you have good restore points!

Keep us informed!


Later Ted

If you have valuable data files (documents, pictures, etc) which you don't want to lose, you can save them onto an external hard disk or DVDs before doing the system recovery described by Bare Foot Kid.

If you can't boot into Windows to make your backup copies, you could do it by removing the laptop's hard disk and connect it to another Windows computer using an external USB hard disk adapter (about $25 from most computer stores). Then you can copy your important files from it using Windows Explorer.

Hi guys
Sorry it's taken so long to get back to you - between work...
I eventually pulled the plug on the PC - seems like vista just stopped - no changes had been made, I never lost anything – but in return I was left with the source problem - that being I couldn't get vista to log on to my nas - I did a back up - full system restore. Seem that it's working ok for now.

Thank you for you help

Neil

Hello trulight.

I'm glad to see you getting it sorted!















Later Ted