Looking for some sympathy....

[Andavari]

Stupid machines.

...with MS Windows installed on them!

[Andavari]

Truth be told, this recovery partition is worth its weight in gold.

Yeah it is and we made those all by ourselves back in the Win9x era, but solely because the installation was loads faster than installing via a CD and installing from HDD also made Win98 just seem to run smoother for longer before needing to be formatted again. I still have my Win98 install partition on my Win98 PC that includes critical software, some downloaded software, and some commercial software too.

 

Those partitions really come in handy if a CD/DVD drive has went kaput which happened to me in 2000 or 2001, and when that happened I also appreciated having a floppy drive just to get some small sized needed applications installed like zip/unzip software.

[Robbie]

I'm running a Compaq Presario (HP) and the HD has a recovery partition, about 6gb, which isn't actually hidden, but there are visual warnings to leave it well alone.

 

There's also an application called recguard which runs on startup which hopefully does what it says, "Guard the Recovery Partition".

 

There are two options with it, RECOVERY or DESTRUCTIVE RECOVERY. Both options remove all software you have installed yourself, although the first is supposed to keep all data files ie Pics, Music.

 

If anyone else here has these features, believe me, on one occasion the non destructive recovery removed all the data files as well, but fortunately, I didn't trust it so I backed them up beforehand.

 

Truth be told, this recovery partition is worth its weight in gold.

 

Edit: Thanks fredvries, appreciate that.

I have recguard running on my computer too, but it would appear that the recovery solution it protects has been made by a different company as mine has three options (as in that screenshot above), one of which definitely doesn't do anything other than reinstall all the factory shipped applications and settings, whilst leaving alone any software I have downloaded such as firefox, thunderbird etc. It does, however, reset any pre-installed software back to its original version eg Adobe Reader, iTunes, which mean I have to then update.

 

Anyway, glad to hear you have sorted out the problem, hopefully it won't occur again!

[DennisD]

....leaving alone any software I have downloaded such as firefox, thunderbird etc. It does, however, reset any pre-installed software back to its original version eg Adobe Reader, iTunes, which mean I have to then update.

 

Anyway, glad to hear you have sorted out the problem, hopefully it won't occur again!

Leaving your downloaded stuff sounds like a good idea Robbie, but I think I prefer a clean slate if I've had a problem bad enough to warrant reinstalling.

 

Probably an over-reaction, but we do whatever we feel more comfortable with I suppose.

 

Anyway reinstalling all this stuff keeps me out of trouble, and it gets rid of a lot of software that's never used.

[Robbie]

Leaving your downloaded stuff sounds like a good idea Robbie, but I think I prefer a clean slate if I've had a problem bad enough to warrant reinstalling.

 

Probably an over-reaction, but we do whatever we feel more comfortable with I suppose.

 

Anyway reinstalling all this stuff keeps me out of trouble, and it gets rid of a lot of software that's never used.

I prefer a clean reinstall too - in fact I have an image of the factory shipped Windows XP system stored on disk, and backed up to another TWO disks and have used it to reinstall everything after I had a major computer problem last year - to ensure the problem was properly dealt with I wiped the entire hard drive using a program called DBAN (not for the faint hearted! - it wipes everything - literally, all partitions including the system recovery partition as well as the user partition etc leaving the computer with a hard drive that has nothing on it, no partitions or anything else - completely blank). I then started the computer, inserted the disk at the prompt and it then formatted the hard drive, created the recovery partition and then unpacked everything to the user (C:) partition.

 

I had everything backed up I needed - all my data, the exe files for all my software etc, so I had the computer up and running smoothly quite quickly with only the Windows Updates to worry about. Obviously that was done because of the problem I had at the time, now I would just use the destructive recovery in the system recovery partition to return the computer to its factory state and then reinstall that way. The image disks are just "insurance". My system recovery solution allows the creation of a backup image disk (only one though, as per Windows licence), this is what I did when I first bought the computer then I just copied that disk twice for further peace of mind - all three copies work fine.

[DennisD]

Also Dennis my rundll32 doesn't have a cog on either. Did you try safe mode?

 

have a read here just for a bit of background.

 

http://inquirer.philly.com/newsroom/faq/pa...fdb7df9-65.html

 

Hazel, I owe you an apology.

 

I never looked closely at this because I thought it was a link to some info on safe mode, which I'd already tried.

 

Don't ask what made me come back to this post, but I'm pleased I did, as there's a lot of info on that site.

[hazelnut]

Dennis your apology is accepted You were very stressed after all your reinstalling!

 

Yes, it is quite an interesting article with some good rundll info in it.

[CeeCee]

No Sympathy For The Devil.