Win 7 Deletes System Restore Points at Reboot
Users have noticed that Windows 7 will delete system restore points after installing applications/drivers and then rebooting.
Slashdot points the way to an annoying bug in Windows 7 that apparently will delete restore points--without prior warning--when the system reboots. The Slashdot post echos what many consumers are reporting on an answers.microsoft.com forum thread found here. Microsoft has addressed the issue with a manual workaround, however there's no official patch, and many users are reporting that the simply fix doesn't work.
In a nutshell, affected users install an application or driver that (seemingly) requires the need to reboot. During the process, the system hangs at the "Starting Windows" screen, and the hard drive remains active. It's believed at this point that the OS is deleting the current system restore points.
"Unfortunately I only found this out when Windows barfed at a USB dongle and I wanted to restore the system to an earlier state," an anonymous writer states. "This is an extraordinarily bad bug, which I suspect most Windows 7 users won't realize is affecting them until it's too late." Many who are complaining about the system restore bug have discovered the issue on clean re-installs of the OS.
One user claims to have fixed the problem using Vssadmin in the command prompt and changing the allocation size on the target hard drive. Microsoft support takes a longer route using a 2-method process, requiring Win7 users to check for the COM+ Event System and to locate DGIVecp.
If you've recently experienced this problem, head to this forum post for both the user and Microsoft fixes.
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Aside from the lack of reports for this problem a post also on slashdot revealed the following:
"A quick Bing search brought me to another thread where the guy's problem turned out to be a disk defrag utility that was deleting restore points on reboot. He disabled the utility, and the restores stopped disappearing."
i may be a pc, but that's not my fault
More often that not system restore is no use. Either way I have it disabled atm due to SSD use.
"Windows 7 punches baby in the face" is another good headline.
as a tech iv seen system restore as being more harmful then good 99% of the time - ever tried cleaning out virus's from a system to have the client notice something is missing or different, then system restore the system which restores the virus's and spyware too?
Its not as if safemode doesnt cover driver issues either, and system restore does slow down the system and fill the hdd with more crap you dont need, and if your windows has issues, YOUR DUE FOR A REINSTALL.
As above, 'none' of my built computers have system restore enabled or if it does, its set to use minimal space. Once your computers gone, it's gone and frankly a full restore seems like a much better idea. Check out R drive image... quick easy, painless.
I'm not saying that System restore is bad or anything, just that in over 6 years, I've only used it once.
@ apache_lives,
Thats why if you know what you are doing you dissable and clean out the restore points when you clean the virus from the system.
Its a usefull tool if used properly and not relied on to get idiotic users out of the brown stuff when they go all tool bar happy etc.
Mactronix
System restore points are very useful. There are frequently cases where installing a new piece of hardware or software makes a mess that's hard to clean up. Being able to roll back a day or so can save a lot of time and aggravation. I'm having the problem described with restore points getting deleted on reboot. I've tried every fix that I've read about and none of them work. MS needs to figure this out an fix it!