Windows Vista goes to "Startup Recovery Options"

If you're nervous with the command prompt do a complete image of your drive so you got all of your files or only select the folders containing files you need using Disk Copy.
 
How'd you guess I might be nervous about that ? :smile:

I've read the info on the Disk Copy site. One thing I didn't see mentioned, can I copy to one of the portable drives (i.e., the Western Digital MyBook)? Will they work when I am not in the Windows environment? I know the jump drives do, just not sure about the larger drives.
 
Its a bootable disc like ghost or acronis true image but free, so yes it can be ran outside of Windows. The screenshots look like its in Windows but its not. It sports an easy to use GUI. It has support for hard drives up to 1TB according to thier site and usb and firewire devices.

Edit: see this episode of Systm for a brief showing of disk copy in action.
 
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O.K., I'm just full of questions, aren't I? I obtained and used DiskCoy and it indicated that everything copied over perfectly. However, when I try to open user files to get to Documents, I get an Access is denied message. I'm guessing this is because they would have been behind the login password protection? Is there a way I can open these to recover individual items?

Thanks
 
Do another backup. Don't allow it to copy over security permissions. If you've encrypted the files in Windows than you won't be able to access them. Login shouldn't matter much since its an offline image you obtained (outside of Windows while Windows is sleeping). To be honest I'm not sure if you can do a file-based recovery. I use Acronis True Image personally, and would recommend it, but its not free. Disk Copy's site doesnt do a good job of explaining that. If you can't theres other tools you can try, like Clonezilla, PING, or the paid tools mentioned above. Or just use xcopy. Its not that hard if you take a look at the help. You can use wildcards too, say copy everything in a paticular folder and its subdirectories.
 
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O.K. Nothing is incrypted, so I should be O.K. there. How do I prevent it from copying security permissions? I think that must be it, because it just seems to be the user folders that are denyng me access.
 
Should be an option as you're making the backup. Everyones different, but along the lines of "Preserve" or "Keep" file security permissions is the option you don't want to have enabled. Maybe it'll allow you to choose not to on restore too, or at least acronis allows you to do that.
 
I'm having the same problem as Wayne, however have not gone beyond trying system restore over and over again.

I can at least get to system restore (with or without the vista recovery download), but after it had been 'finalising file restore' for over 12hrs, I guess it's not working. I am on the 2nd attempt using your restore download, and system restore is running (1hr and counting).

I think re-installing is next.

Is there any way of backing up my files at this point?

=======Candice
 
Apsara said:
Is there any way of backing up my files at this point?

=======Candice
Click to expand...
Hello Candice, welcome to NST.
Have you already tried the methods of backing up files described in this thread? If not, then I would advise you to try one of them, and you should be able backup your data. Its not too complicated...
Basically you copy the files from your data folders, such as Username/Documents or Username/Music, or Username/Downloads, etc. onto something like an external HDD, if you have one, using a Linux LiveCD or some other method to access your data partition(s) so you can copy the files over. :wink:

Jake
 
Vista startup problems

My Dell XPS 1530 laptop suddenly has decided not to boot automatically. I am able to get it to run in safe mode, and once or twice I've had it running Vista normally, but I had to go through safe mode to get this to happen.

Despite multiple attempts, I have been unable to return to an earlier restore point, and the recovery utility says it cannot fix the problem, whatever it is. I've spent/wasted several hours on this now.

I did download the Vista_Recovery_Disk.iso, but I have no idea how to use it. The instructions might as well be in Greek, which I do not speak. My PC came only with a Vista re-installation disc, not a recovery disc.

Please help!

WW3DE
 
You need to go to msconfig > Startup tab and start re-enabling needed apps on startup (like your antivirus) one by one until you can spot the problem application.
 
Our recovery disk is only to help you get back into your PC when the boot process is broken.
You don't have that problem, so don't go using it unless you actually have to.
You might make things worse.
 
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