Hola,

I had a disaster earlier this week that rendered current running XP drive 
non bootable. Well it would boot, but never gave me control of the desktop.

I used a spare drive to get system booted. I mounted the bad drive as slave 
and recovered users data. I then used a Western Digital tool to reblast the 
corrupted drive and copy the running drive into the reformatted drive that 
had the problem.

Well I'm up and running with one problem (so far) ..... System Restore 
Service won't start and gave this error.

Could not start .... Error 3: The system could not find the specified path. 
This is a bit more information than I got when I tried to get to system 
restore through My Computer/System Restore.

I DO see looking at the root of the volume a hidden dir System Volume 
Information in that dir a couple of files and another hidden dir 
(_restore{stuff}), so I don't understand. At this point be willing to loose 
my  restore points in favor of getting the service running again. My 
question is. If I go into safe mode and rename System Volume Information 
then reboot would that dir get recreated? I've had recyle bin problem and 
just deleted recycler and it recreated it when I rebooted. Any insight would 
be helpful.

Jim

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Jim Holsenback wrote:
> If I go into safe mode and rename System Volume Information 
> then reboot would that dir get recreated?

Yes. The only things stored in that directory in XP are restore points and 
mount points. If you've mounted an NTFS partition on a directory (instead of 
a drive letter), you'll need to remount it.

You might not even need to go into safe mode. Just take ownership of the 
directory and then change the permissions. Then reboot.

I'd suggest scheduling a chkdsk /f first, also, in case that's the problem.

Note this is from personal experience and not documentation or anything, so 
if you're in a very sophisticated environment there might be more stuff in 
there I don't know about.  Renaming is probably a better idea than deleting, 
yes.

Also to check: look at the dependencies for the system restore service and 
make sure they're all running.

There's also a mechanism that works poorly under XP but might be of help 
that checks the signatures on all the Windows files and makes sure they're 
good - I'm not sure what the name is, but if toasting the SVI doesn't help, 
you might want to look into it. It compares stuff with the dllcache 
directory and fixes or saves or whatever it needs to, but it has trouble if 
you've applied certain patches.

HTH!

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Darren New wrote:
> Jim Holsenback wrote:
>> If I go into safe mode and rename System Volume Information then 
>> reboot would that dir get recreated?
> 
> Yes. 

By which I mean I have several times in the past deleted this directory and 
had it recreated without any problem, personally on my own computer. :) Just 
in case you thought I was being completely theoretical. :-)

You can also delete the pagefile.sys and the hiberfil.sys while the system 
isn't running, if you want.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:49849a8f$1@news.povray.org...
> There's also a mechanism that works poorly under XP but might be of help 
> that checks the signatures on all the Windows files and makes sure they're 
> good - I'm not sure what the name is, but if toasting the SVI doesn't 
> help, you might want to look into it. It compares stuff with the dllcache 
> directory and fixes or saves or whatever it needs to, but it has trouble 
> if you've applied certain patches.

would that be sfc /scannow from the command line?

Jim

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Jim Holsenback wrote:
> would that be sfc /scannow from the command line?

Yes, that's the one I was thinking of. You can also tell it to scan on the 
next reboot, I think.  Beware - I've had all kinds of ugly problems with 
this. I'm not sure it works right after you've applied windows updates. 
Maybe it just breaks on *some* windows updates. I wouldn't do it if you 
aren't willing to lose the whole installation.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:4984b960@news.povray.org...
> Jim Holsenback wrote:
>> would that be sfc /scannow from the command line?
>
> Yes, that's the one I was thinking of. You can also tell it to scan on the 
> next reboot, I think.  Beware - I've had all kinds of ugly problems with 
> this. I'm not sure it works right after you've applied windows updates. 
> Maybe it just breaks on *some* windows updates. I wouldn't do it if you 
> aren't willing to lose the whole installation.

yes ... i'm taking a PASS on that .... always nice to have someone concur 
:-)

Thanks

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:49849ca9$1@news.povray.org...
> By which I mean I have several times in the past deleted this directory 
> and had it recreated without any problem, personally on my own computer. 
> :) Just in case you thought I was being completely theoretical. :-)
>
> You can also delete the pagefile.sys and the hiberfil.sys while the system 
> isn't running, if you want.

Darren .... thanks I'm G2G now :-)

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