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Manual DOS or Windows 3.x Recovery

If you are running your PC in a DOS environment, and you don't have single-step recovery capability, you can do a manual restore of your system without too much hassle. Unlike under Windows 95, you will generally have no problems with interference when doing the recovery, since you will be performing the restore in a single-tasking DOS environment. There can be a few exceptions however.

The first thing you will generally need to do to perform a restore manually is to set up again your DOS environment. You will have to boot the system with your boot disk, reformat your hard disk and set up your basic operating system files.

Once the hard disk is bootable, you should then reinstall your backup software (which includes the recovery utility) and run it to restore your system. In general, follow the recovery directions that come with your backup software to make sure you do everything right. The only possible conflict areas may be if the backup software itself is on the backup media and you restore it over top of the copy you installed to do the restore. Usually this isn't a problem though.

Note: When restoring Windows 3.x, if you restore the permanent swap file then you may get an error message when you run Windows for the first time, telling you that the swap file is corrupt. This is nothing to be worried about as Windows will recreate the swap file and nothing will be lost as a result of this. (Really, you shouldn't bother backing up the swap file anyway.)

Next: Manual Windows 95 Recovery

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