It's been several months since I worked on this in depth, so I no longer have (or remember) the exact links I checked. At any rate, it was on the internet, and the only clue I came upon was that the Shadow Copy portion of System Restore was not working,
maybe missing a file. I tried three third-party free programs to make an image of the hard drive, and all failed (Paragon back-up and recovery, EASEUS Partition Master 4.0, Drive Backup 9.0 Express, and maybe some others which I have uninstalled and
forgotten).
When I initiate a System Restore, it proceeds as though it is working, shuts down, reboots, and then a notice appears that "System Restore could not complete (or words to that effect), your files have not been changed." No other information
appears. I have tried many restore points and none would work.
I am running an eMachines T3508 with WIN XP Home SP3, plenty of hard disk space (only using 45GB out of 144GB); this problem has existed since the machine was new about three years ago, and I have never been able to use System Restore. It didn't seem
too important in the beginning, but what with the newer and heftier spybots and other malware these days it is starting to seem more and more important.
I tried to use the CD that came with the machine to restore part of the OS, but it doesn't do just a repair - it completely reinstalls the OS, which I really don't want to tackle if it can be avoided. Since I can't make an image of the drive, all programs
would have to be reinstalled. Ugh.
If someone can tell me of a fix for this problem I would be very grateful.
