Win7 Can Delete All System Restore Points On Reboot 449
Posted
by
kdawson
from the yes-we-have-no-recovery dept.
from the yes-we-have-no-recovery dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Astonishingly, the so-called system restore feature in Windows 7 deletes restore points without warning when the system is rebooted. This forum thread on answers.microsoft.com shows some of the users who have experienced the problem. Today I did a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit (no dual boot), and noticed that whenever the machine rebooted after installing an application or driver, the disk churned for several minutes on the 'starting Windows' screen. Turns out that churning was the sound of my diligently created system restore points being deleted. Unfortunately I only found this out when Windows barfed at a USB dongle and I wanted to restore the system to an earlier state. This is an extraordinarily bad bug, which I suspect most Windows 7 users won't realise is affecting them until it's too late."
In Soviet Microsoft (Score:2, Funny)
system reboots you!
System restore! So we meet again, my nemesis! (Score:5, Funny)
It's going to be a rough one! A working restore is like catching the white whale. Sure you can do it but it might kill you
in the process.
Re:Can't be affecting all users (Score:5, Funny)
Warning: Your style of discussion hinders M$ bashing on slashdot and might get you banned.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
Tell that to Gentoo Linux and their default WIPE /tmp ON BOOT option!
Perhaps my own fault for keeping stuff i need in /tmp, but still no excuse.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
Foolish? I think that's an understatement. Using temp for storage is like getting angry when people flush your shit down a toilet.
Re:Stop preaching Linux (Score:3, Funny)
Please stop preaching Linux like a religion.
You sinner!!! I hope that when you are done in Earth you get a Job(s) as the doorman in hell's Gates!
(All right, all right, this one was awful!)
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
That is where I keep all of my important documents.
I have a nasty habbit of wiping out my home directory and ever since the janitor app died it's been a good world writable location.
Now I can share important projects, personal documents and data troves.
In fact the tmp directory worked so well for my data needs that I moved all of home to that directory. I wanted to facilitate synergy between users.
Eventually a friend gave me a wonderful suggestion of migrating the entire operating system to tmp. Through a clever array of symlinks I have moved all the original folders to tmp and created links in the original locations. I now have the best of both worlds!
This is pretty much all thanks to a friend of mine who has a sys admin gig at a nearby college. He's even helping me work out a new system of backups via the high speed tape interface "/dev/null."
He is pretty friendly so if you are on irc you can look him up under his nick BOFH for some friend sys admin tips.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Can't be affecting all users (Score:1, Funny)
Warning: Your style of discussion hinders M$ bashing on slashdot and might get you banned.
It's not bashing discussing a feature of Windows 7. The delete restore points on reboot "feature" worked perfectly. There are no bugs in Windows just features you are using improperly. Personally I miss the helpful and friendly "blue screen". Also "Safe Mode" always reminded me of the cover of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Safe Mode may not have been very helpful but the name "Safe Mode" had a warm and fuzzy feeling and softened the blow of having a bricked computer.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:3, Funny)
System Restore is a security problem (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How prevalent? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
The urinal knows nothing...
The janitor on the other hand, sitting in his room behind his desk filled with rows of video monitors, VCR's and 'flush' buttons...
Re:How prevalent? (Score:3, Funny)
Tell that to Gentoo Linux and their default WIPE /tmp ON BOOT option! /tmp, but still no excuse.
Perhaps my own fault for keeping stuff i need in
To be fair, I blame this on a lack of good Linux documentation.
Referencing the gentoo howto titled "Production database environment on tmpfs ramdisk" section 3 subsection 2a, they provide clear and simple wiring guides for attaching a car battery to your RAM, thus removing the need to reboot and preserving your /tmp data.
To summarize, get yourself a car battery and a set of old jumper cables.
Cut the connectors off one end of the cables, and strip about 1/8th inch of insulation off the end, twisting the stranded wires together.
Then, take the exposed wire end of the jumper cables, and carefully align it with the 5 volt pin 134 of your first DIMM.
Take care not to touch either of the pins next to it, or any other exposed surfaces!
The 3/4th inch diameter wire of the jumper cables will make this especially tricky, but persistence is a virtue. Keep trying, it will fit eventually!
Just duct tape the negative wire to the metal of the case.
Then attach the jumper cables to the battery following normal car jumping procedures (Ground first, then hot, with the engine running) and crank gentoo over.
If you would like to help others avoid this simple mistake and many hours of frustration, you should join my freshmeat project group to form a policy to vote on the wording of the bug report to raise this documentation files priority for inclusion with the official documentation.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
[Edit: Looks like the accepted solution on that thread simply increases the space allocated to System Restore! I could be right, maybe?]
Wait! You can edit slashdot posts after posting? I thought they were final! When did this happen?
[Edit: Wow. This is amazing. Looks like its working here on my end. How about you guys?]
Re:How prevalent? (Score:3, Funny)
There's a wealthy woman on my block who's been married so many times that she keeps her wedding pictures in a temporary folder.
(DVD's are on sale in the lobby, don't forget to tip your waitress.)
Re:How prevalent? (Score:3, Funny)
We've got a bathroom full of auto flushing urinals and toilets at my work. The bathroom also has motion controlled lights. Somehow the flush sensors aren't quite calibrated correctly, so the first person to enter the room after the lights have been off for a while gets to experience a symphony of half a dozen toilets flushing together. It's pretty weird first thing in the morning.
Could be worse (Score:3, Funny)
Yesterday I needed to boot into windows (the D&DI Character Generator doesn't work in wine, as far as I can tell), and I was greeted after boot with a lovely screen telling me that the system was broken and in need of repair. So my two options were restore from backup or repair. I had no backup, so I went to repair, and under "select drive," there was no system install. Windows had apparently uninstalled itself.
I'm still trying to sort out what happened.
Re:In Soviet Microsoft (Score:1, Funny)
You don't need to communist to have your system rebooted, just install McAfee...