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Manual Windows 95 Recovery

Recovering from disaster under Windows 95 can be a very troublesome affair. In fact, it is the problems that users have with recovery in this multitasking environment that has prompted many companies to create single-step recovery features in their backup software. If your software doesn't have this feature though, you can still avoid many of the nasty restore problems by using the technique in this section.

There are two basic problems with manual recovery under Windows 95. The first and less difficult is that you have to reinstall Windows 95 so that you can reinstall your backup software and do the restore. Reinstalling DOS takes a few minutes, while reinstalling Windows 95 can take an hour. This is annoying, but pretty much unavoidable without using single-step recovery backup software.

The second and more trying problem is that when you do a hard disk restore under Windows 95, you are running in a multitasking environment and you will run into software conflicts, even worse than the ones you sometimes will see when doing backups. In particular, when you try to restore the key C:\WINDOWS directory (or whatever it is called on your PC), which includes the Windows 95 Registry and many other files that are in active use while Windows 95 is running, you will run into locked files representing what you are running now, that cannot be overwritten by what you are restoring. In a way, it's a bit like the proverbial "chicken and the egg". The result is often a corrupt Registry and an improper or aborted system recovery.

There is, fortunately, a way to get around this that you can try, if your system has at least two disk partitions. See this procedure for step-by-step instructions.

Next: Troubleshooting and Repair Guide

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