Windows XP system restore points all wiped out

[ls]

Hello,

I've had my lenovo R61 Thinkpad, running Windows XP Pro, since June 20th. I've been installing updates and software slowly and carefully, making restore points along the way.

I live in a rural area and had purchased DVD-R's to create the recovery discs, only discovering when I got home that that was only possible with CD-ROM's, which I was only able to purchase today. I created all of the discs required both to access the Lenovo tools and to restore the laptop to factory condition.

Tonight I went to create my daily restore point before shutting down for the night and discovered, to my horror, that all of my restore points are gone. I have done nothing to the settings whatsoever. I at no time turned off the system restore, and when I checked the settings, the box to turn off system restore was not checked. The disc space to use is set at 17, 489 MB.

What on earth could have happened here? Something like this could have been an utter disaster if I had experienced any sort of problem.

This did happen on my desktop PC a year or so ago because System restore was creating restore points for both my C drive and my D drive (which is a recovery drive and is locked and impossible for anyone or anything to change anyway). The D drive on that PC is very small so when there was no longer enough space on that drive for system restore, all of my restore points for both drives were eliminated, which came as an utter and devastating surprise to me. On that PC, I was able to have system restore NOT monitor D drive any longer.

The recovery drive on this laptop is totally hidden from me, however, so I don't seem to be able to tell system restore to ignore this drive if it is not already.

This is unacceptable to me to have my entire system restore points wiped out when I've had the system for less than 2 weeks.

Can anyone please tell me...is this related to my having created the recovery discs today, or is it something else?

[ls]

OK, update...for educational purposes for others.

I went to another forum and did some reading and through there, ended up viewing my event logs in 'Event Viewer'.

For some odd reason, System Restore attempted to create a restore point in the middle of my burning those recovery CD's, which wasn't a good thing. System Restore is not supposed to do that.

The Event says:

The System Restore filter encountered the unexpected error 0XC000000D while processing the file 'recover.ini' on the volume 'Harddiskvolume2'. It has stopped monitoring the volume.

So there you have it.

My advice to anyone engaged in lengthy CD burn sessions (I think it took a good 30 minutes if not longer to burn all those CD's), check your system restore right after you're done just in case.

If anyone knows why System Restore would not have clued in to the fact that the computer was certainly not idle, let me know.

I created a restore point and rebooted. That restore point is still there, so the service is working once again.

[RealBlackStuff]

I don't want to have anything to do with System Restore Points.
Never even used them once in all the years I've had XP, always switch it off for all HDs.
I much rather rely on a good disk-imaging program, such as Acronis True Image, and take an image before I install something new.

Image restoring takes only minutes, if the need arises.


As to your SRP problem, could it be that the CDRW is using a hard disk cache in the same area that the SRP wanted to write?
Are you using the Windows built-in CDRW software or a dedicated program?
If the first, I would call it a royal balls-up.
If the latter, perhaps you can tell that pgm to put it's cache on another partition/HD.
I'm only guessing here...

[ls]

Thanks for your reply.

I think the thing is that System Restore wants to run automatically once a day and I see there is no way to schedule that. I would assume System Restore would want to try running at a time when the computer is not being used. With my Thinkpad, there wouldn't be much opportunity. If the Thinkpad is open, someone is using it. When the user is finished, the Thinkpad gets closed up and goes into standby. I've been creating restore points manually.

Last night I was burning the rescue and recovery discs using the Lenovo software to do it. That took a total of 10 discs, and I think what may have happened is that in the brief time between me changing discs, System Restore may have tried to start and then the CD writer started and messed things up with System Restore. Probably a fluke. At least I hope so.

I'm not likely to be engaged in burning discs like that again. But if I do burn anymore, I'll try to remember to create a restore point first so that System Restore won't think it needs to create a daily one on its own.