Re: More on system restore failure

Hi,


Are there any Norton applications installed?

"Restoration Incomplete. Your computer cannot be restored . . . "
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/symantecdoc1.html

Regards,
Bert Kinney MS-MVP Shell/User
http://bertk.mvps.org
Member: http://dts-l.org

mvaugeri wrote:
System Restore will not work on my system in “normal mode”. I’m running Windows XP SP2 with all updates as of 5/12/2007 on an ASUS M6Ne notebook computer. What I mean by “will not work” is that I don’t get any error messages or any indication that anything is wrong until the final step in the restore process, where I get the System Restore message screen saying:


System Restore

X Restoration Incomplete

Your computer cannot be restored to:

restore point details

No changes have been made to your computer.

To choose another restore point, restart System Restore.


According to the documentation that I’ve seen (Microsoft Knowledge Base, Microsoft TechNet, Bert Kinney’s System Restore web site), an account that has “administrative rights” is needed to run system restore in normal mode. I’m logged in under the user account Mike, which, according to “contol.exe userpasswords2”, belongs to the “Administrators” group. Also, the Control Panel applet User Accounts shows the account as “Computer administrator, Password protected”. I’ve checked the Event Log under both Application and System and have never seen any indication of a problem at the time the restore was attempted. I’ve tried several procedures outlined in this forum to correct the problem – allow the user account to run system restore in normal mode – all to no avail. What I’ve tried:

1. Disable/Enable system restore from My Computer/Properties/System Restore to clear out all old system restore points and create a new restore point (Will Denny, 8/27/2005).

2. Reinstalling System Restore (using sr.inf) from my Windows XP SP2 disc (Bert Kinney, 8/28/2005).

3. Disabling system restore on my external disk (I think Bert Kinney’s web site).

4. Disabling ZoneAlarm Pro (see http://bertk.mvps.org/html/srfail.html . I’m running ZoneAlarm Pro 7.0.337.000, but I tried disabling it anyhow. In fact, I shut down all tasks that normally run in the background (for example, programs shown in the systray notification area).

5. Gaining access to System Volume Information folder (using CACLS; see Microsoft KB309531). I did this to be sure that all the restore points were deleted when I disabled system restore. All restore points were gone.

The only procedure that worked, that is, allowed me to complete a system restore, was the following:

6. Running system restore in “Safe Mode” (Bert Kinney 12/27/2006). I didn’t have to use the Administrator account in safe mode. As explained above, I have a user account named Mike on my system and I don’t have password login enabled, so when I started in safe mode, I got to the Mike account.

After investigating further I found that Microsoft’s article KB306084 (last review May 7, 2007) is a bit misleading because it says “Log on to Windows as Administrator”, but the Administrator account isn’t available in “normal mode” startup on Windows XP if you have created other user accounts. When I enable logging on using user names and passwords, the Administrator account is not available. In the Control Panel applet User Accounts, if I uncheck “Use the Welcome screen” and then click “start”, “Log Off” and “Log Off”, I’ll get to the “Log On to Windows” screen where you can enter a user name and password. The default user name is “Mike”. When I change the user name to Administrator and provide the correct password, I get the message “Unable to log you on because of an account restriction.”

Anyhow, the bottom line is that the only way I can get system restore to work correctly is to run it in safe mode. It’s probable that even then the account running it needs “administrative rights” although I didn’t try creating an account with “limited” rights to try to run system restore.

Is there anyone that can explain why system restore doesn’t work as described in the available documentation?

Thanks,

Mike
.

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