For some reason the ‘recovery’ disks that came with a friend’s eMachines desktop pc can not actually recover anything! All they do is restore/write the factory settings on there, which is useless!
My friend has many great photos on their hard drive so when their pc wouldn’t boot past the windows loading screen they got pretty annoyed. It seems like explorer wont load up, so i tried all the usuals like:
1. Ctrl+Alt+Del – NOTHING
2. WIN+r to try force run explorer – NOTHING
3. There was mouse movement, but no more
4. Safe mode – same symptoms only at a lower resolution
5. Last known good configuration – NOTHING
6. Checked the BIOS to see if anything weird was up – NOTHING
Very weird and quite frustrating… Almost points to a hardware failure but let’s hope it’s not.
What i’ve done:
1. I’ve taken the hard drive out of the machine and put it into an external hard drive case.
eMachines' Hard Drive in external USB hard drive case (taken apart)
2. I have a secondary external hard drive on which i have created a folder to store the PC’s hard drive contents
3. Then i simply ‘recover’ the PC to factory settings and drag over the relevant data from the external backup
This is the 2nd time that this has happened to this particular machine so i am installing a nice little application called Allway Sync which will monitor folders and automatically back up those folders to the external drive, so if and when this happens again there will be no fiddly taking the machine apart and all that…
I could use system restore but i find machines like this grinding themselves to a halt if you let windows manage their recovery and repairs.
I don’t know if this will help anyone, but if you have any questions i’ll be happy to answer them.
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