Hi this is Roger DeReu. My website is freecomputerconsultant.com. And in this little screencast video, what I wanted to show you was how you can prepare yourself for a somewhat unlikely event but one that I do see frequently enough to comment on because it is kind of serious when it happens. Now I have just go here an image of it because ordinarily, it’s not a Windows screen, you can really capture the show but you might get this message sometime, you are booting up your machine.
Windows could not start because the following files are missing or corrupt. It will have Windows System 32 Config. I might say a system; I might say a software here. What that is referring to are two very important registry files that Windows uses to save your configuration, the system is more of the hardware of your machine and software obviously more things that have to do with the software that is installed.
If you lose either if those two files, Windows will not boot and a lot of times that happens because maybe the machine did not get shutdown properly or maybe even the hard drive started to go bad because those two files are accessed quite frequently and very heavily, sometimes the hard drive will actually kind of start failing there first.
Now if you get this message here, if you go to Microsoft site, they will tell you why you put in your Windows CD and boot from that and you can try to recover and yeah that might work but a lot of times with that’s relying on are these files down here in Windows\repair. And what are seeing here is like this file here, security, software, system; these are—these files that you might see as being missing or corrupt, these are backups of them. Look at the dates. I am doing this in June of 2008, these files are from December of 2006, probably when the machine was first set up and configured.
Of restoring these files is not going to do you a lot of good. You are going to—you are going to end up probably reinstalling a lot of drivers and software and that is not going to be very fun.
Now I can talk about doing image backups which are my favorite type of backups but if you get to something like this and then you are not going to have that and I like to have as many tools as possible to try to recover from a problem and there is real easy way to update these back ups.
If you go to your Start button, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, yeah I know they burry it and here is the builted backup routine in Windows Xp and what I like to do is uncheck this box here and not start the Wizard mode, just cancel right out. Come back in and just get the regular Backu[p Utility. Here I am going to click on Backup. Now here you see the options for backing up and which you are going to—want to check is System State and that is just a special backup the Windows can do that records System information but one of the side effects is it will take the current registry and it will create current backups in this repair directory and we can watch that happen.
I am going back the Backup Utility, you can just actually put this backup, now granted if you put in a place other than your C drive, it’s just going to do you even more good but even just putting it on your C drive is going to update those files in the repair directory and you will be glad you have them. And we just start that and we can actually come back here just moment.
Now as you can see here, the backup is only—and all ready, these files done here, system, software, security, SAM and default, these have all been updated with the current date and time and notice the software for instance our registry file was about 8 meg before. It is now three times that size. The system was of again about maybe a third or a quarter of the current size. So there is a lot more information there now.
So even if we canceled out of this, we have still performed a valuable function in the recovery of our system from a potentially very serious problem.
Okay now our backup is complete. It only took two minutes and ten seconds. It really does not take very long. You can close that. Now if you want to get fancy about this, you could actually, you know save the job and schedule it and you can do that right here on the Schedule tab and just Add Job, Back up selected or take the only Back up just to save data and you can choose a location, type a name for the backup. You can verify or not, I do not think you really need to at this point but I can order it, Replace the existing backups and when you are on the backup and you can just put in here, System State Backup. You can set a schedule and you can say weekly and then just and just, you know, pick something that works out for you a when your computer is on. There are a lot of settings that you really do not have to pay to much attention to and select OK. You can input a username and password here to make sure that the account login can access the data and Save it, in this case, I just cancel it but that is all it really takes and you can have this Job actually run automatically for you. You know, say once per week or once a month. You know once a week might be good, again it does not take very long but you really going to be glad you had it if you call a computer professional such as myself to try to recover from a message like this, it really is pretty nasty and a lot of times does result in a reload of Windows and all your programs be—the benefits of that, can be kind of heavy once in while but I guarantee if this happens, it will be at the worst possible time and you will not want to be doing any kind of repair and install or completely reinstall one step at a time.
But that is it for ties video tip. Please visit my website, freecomputerconsultant.com. I have got a lot of other information in there. I got other videos, tips, things like that, you can sign up for my free newsletter but that is it for this one. Thanks for watching.
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