AvgOrdinaryGuy

Yes, I'm starting System Restore from the Win Recovery environment. This morning, after the restore process had been running for 24hrs, Windows had finally crashed completely. The circle of spinning dots had stopped spinning, and even the mouse was unresponsive. So I held power button to power down, and once restarted, it booted to the desktop and displayed an error window stating that System Restore had failed and no file had been changed. It offered to continue the process from the desktop (which I tried), but Windows crashed again soon after, and I had to leave for work. On my return, I tried booting the Windows 10 installation DVD to attempt to "Reset this PC", keeping all my files and reinstalling Windows. Soon after starting the process Windows reports "There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made. I guess next step will be to format the HDD and install anew from scratch.

My Windows 10 (in place upgrade from 7) system has been freezing up on my for the past two weeks. SFC /SCANNOW has not uncovered any errors, so I decided to do a system restore to a point in time before the problems started. Yesterday, I ran System Restore, and after the "Finished" dialog was on screen for 3 hours, I assumed it has stalled and I powered the PC down. Upon restarting Win10 alerted me that System Restore failed to complete and changes had not been applied. So I re-started the System Restore process this AM at about 9:00, went away for a few hours, and checked in on it at 2PM when the restore process was still running. Sometime after 2PM the System Restore dialog box has been displaying "Finished" with a solid green progress bar for about an hour and a half. How long should I expect to wait for the restore process to complete? Does it usually take 8 hours? 12? 24 hours, or what?

Tried opening the file with notepad and I don't really know what I'm looking for. But, I saw reference to some of the data I would expect to see in the file, but there was also reference to some other file names that are not a part of the spreadsheet. Like some pictures that I was moving around from one folder to another yesterday, a little while before the system hung. Those photos are still intact in the folders that I put them in, but there names were mixed in with info from my spreadsheets. As for structure...again I don't know what I'm looking for, but...the vast majority of characters don't mean anything to me. Most of the file looks something like this: ·Þ®–Â{{6iøXîQéŠz7¨Ò8øáyÛd1³· þuð§ƒÒ¶¥µÔ,gš8#Üe亂“Q±híau³+&?xÞj¹^ÂSêEw¤Çib³It¾c„+:ÜƳ£J2€üækbÏD–ê5Ü­ ÷O\TsG£B2žk¸ã“‘š›i®Ô¡$¾eÉ0Ÿ.<ð àTwË&àí»ŒWôûh.#‘M¤²¶~GUˆ|™$ŽUÚÃ9\Ñm.Uõ±è´áIŠp© l²Ç æF 5 Ù!ŽeEÈÏ­ T± n¦1JYO þê+4Z¬zÛ‰ÈØçä Þ·’ÒS"¨ÃŽõGYÓÜk*>é¢×Ð/mM£ EUàJ”TBAkÌrápO­Y„)@ P)ˆP)@¢” ;KŠ` QN€S€£ P Å.(¥ Å-.(Ç bŠZZ@&(Å-- ŠQF(˜¢E9ŸëSÚJm!Œ Ëó3wÏ¥r)ò91£p2[ñ¯H¼Ó-oe…Kÿ Õ}I×OÓÊA§µÊ° ªŽ?,›•ŽÞw §{dÉ™~ž‚·4K#:ÝÜ´Nd ù2”>¿SS¿†…æÐÚ}šåÏï#i8ÅuVÐ-µ´pÆ¡U Jž[2¯tq–Ú»Aisgt³´²£v@çùS¤ðÉ’ÝgÇœ =뱞ÞЬѫ©ë‘J’DÇdn„÷Aè)è…vÌÝ7A³Ó&3[™7°ÁÜÙ§Š<È÷ìÞ»ÿ »¸gò¬kóiÓ-½¤i$¬9'´]Sz¼ÿ Ħæ Ztv¿Ì9ê)×~ Tried Recuva also, and it said the file is "Unrecoverable - This file is overwritten with system volume information". Looks like I'm going to be rebuilding a spreadsheet from the ground up. Unless someone has other suggestions.

Most of my Works files are stored on an external USB drive. Yesterday, while working with other files, my XP systems explorer stopped responding and I had to reboot. Well, today I discovered that a least two of my Works file are corrupt. Most (maybe all) the other files I've tried to open are OK, but these two will not. The lost files are spreadsheets with some of my business data in them. When I try to open the files, Works asks "open as?", and if I choose spreadsheet it opens but my data is not there. Is there any hope of recovering the data in these files? System restore didn't do it, because the external drive was not included in system restore. Any suggestions are welcome, except of course reminding me of the need for a better backup system. That much I am all too well aware of already.