Guess what? I broke Vista.

May 27, 2008 10:39 AM

I irreparably damaged my installation of Windows Vista by trying to clean out my winsxs folder. I'm pretty sure there's no way to recover at this point. I'd like to know if anyone has some good suggestions for tutorials or tools to use to rescue my user info so that when I reinstall I can salvage my stuff.

I was very good with XP and used to do desktop support for it professionally.. so I'm familiar with file and settings transfer wizard, command line utils, snapins.. all the support goodies. Since then I left desktop support, so I'm not nearly as savvy with Vista.

If it comes down to it.. can I copy my folder from C:\Users\ ? What do I need to look out for, etc...

TIA!

posted by judge.mentok.the.mindtaker to Technology (5 answers total)

Can you boot the PC with Internet access? (safe mode perhaps) Alternately do you have access to the Internet from another computer.

I fixed a XP boot problem by booting to Knoppix, a Linnux distribution that boots and runs off CD or DVD. No installation is required. I then copied the corrupt file from another PC and was then successful booting to Windows.

Do a web search on Knoppix then download the CD image. There is free software available on the net to burn the CD. You could download the DVD image but that took me about 20 hours.

Good luck!
posted by swarkentien at 11:18 AM on May 27, 2008

Here is a link to the Knoppix download mirrors.
posted by swarkentien at 11:24 AM on May 27, 2008

Here is a link to a freeware CD Burner

If you download Knoppix choose a file with -EN- (English) in the name and ending in ".iso" (image) CD size should be about 700MB in size.

Navigate Linnux directory structure with cd (change directory) like Windows. Linux copy command is "cp". Linnux help is available using the command "man" alone or "man insert-command-name-here"
posted by swarkentien at 11:37 AM on May 27, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks. So now I have the system image available, mounted the windoze partition in knoppix and copied my user folder and stuff off...

so nothing fancy? just ye-olde recover my docs and reinstall (e.g. my profiles and whatever else are lost?)
posted by judge.mentok.the.mindtaker at 12:45 PM on May 27, 2008

Have you tried Vista's built in recovery stuff?
posted by gjc at 5:43 PM on May 27, 2008