And now for something completely different!

[Golfer]

A few months back I had a fun little virus that caused my computer to be stuck in a perpetual loop at the windows login screen.  I would type in my password, the message loading personalized settings would show up and keep shooting me right back to the login screen.  Same for safe mode.  This was brought on by some of the Norton folks "helping" remove the virus from my machine and somewhere along the lines they changed a setting to help this occur.  I don't know exactly what it was they did but wound up going round and round with nobody within the whole empire of Norton knowing how to help.  I exhausted my tech support buddy information and had no other means of getting the machine going (laptop was being repaired by the geek squad since it was under warranty) except for reinstalling windows.  Somewhere along the lines things were so bad with my Dell which came with Windows XP home I was forced to reinstall another copy of windows XP pro I had laying around (legitimate copy) overtop of windows with the hopes it would recognize itself.  It didn't.

The hard drive was no wiped clean as evidenced by the fact that I had only 10GB available of my 80GB Hard Drive.  I've been using it for a couple months but just recently bought 4GB of RAM and a new second internal 250GB HD.  I've been looking at upgrading video cards but I've also been looking through my system information which reminded me of the fact that I'm not using my full machines potential.

My question:

Is there a way now that I have a running machine to "roll back" to my original settings that came and turn it back into a factory dell?  Better yet is there a way for me to get the files that are somewhere on my HD moved over to my new one?  I tried using Undelete and some other restoration techniques but short of whatever the FBI uses to dig up this information off of old drives I'm at a loss.  It appears the data is there and I'd like to have it back.  Any ideas?

-Thanks!

[Getback]

Use the repairl disk that came with the dell or go to dell and download the repair disk.

[BaldEagl]

I recently had a drive (actually a file corruption) failure and on my old machine used a program called GetDataBack.  It recovered almost all my lost files.  They make it for both NTFS and for Fat file systems.  It will also recover deleted files, etc.

Once you've recovered your lost files and saved them to your new drive then you can use the Dell system restore disc/function to restore your Dell to it's original factory condition.

[Golfer]

In progress.  Thanks BaldEagl.  I'll see how it goes 

[Golfer]

BaldEagl you do not have to buy a beverage in my presence 

Working like a charm.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Next time if you get a virus while you run an antivirus, do two things:

First of all analyze your behaviour. What did you do wrong to get that virus?
Second, why did you get infected? Your AV obviously can't protect you so you need to do step 1 and change your behaviour models and change AV product.

Last, next time you get a bad virus - don't call any AV folks that will only mess up your computer with no guarantee the virus has completely been removed. Do a fresh format and reinstall (keeping your OS and programs/personal data on separate partitions). Imaging your computer while it's guaranteed working occasionally helps restoring things a lot.

[Golfer]

The virus came from a file from a typically trusted source when they sent me a file.  They've been demoted.

I couldn't bring myself to reformat everything because these files were on there.  They're all back now.  Everything.  My highlight is my logbook I spent a couple months on doing boring-as-hell data entry and error finding in said data entry.  Files, folders, photos, songs, music, videos.  Everything from the last 5 years I thought lost has now returned and is in the process of being cloned onto another 1TB external drive in addition to my new internal hard drive.  Not doing this again. 

[AirFlyer]

Backing up important data is always crucial, or at least IMO keeping it off your main HDD. I have a 750GB I have split into 3 partions for three different OSs and a 1TB I use for mass data storage such as Videos, Music, Etc. The nice thing about this is if say one of my OSs happens to get a virus, become corrupt, or some how I just really messed stuff up a reformat isn't all that big of a hassle, just a 30min drop in the bucket. In any case glad to hear everything is back in order.

[BaldEagl]

Glad to have helped Golfer and glad to hear it worked.