Windows 8.1 - System Restore Button Is Not Working
Sep 15, 2014
This button is not working. The window doesnt hang. There is no error message. It just doesnt say anything. I am trying to install Visual Studio 2013. It needs to create a system restore point before starting installation. Needless to say, it fails too. I am on Windows 8.1. I ran sfc /scannow with no results.
1. I right-click on the recycle bin icon2. If I right-click on the recycle bin I get the busy icon. For a few minutes, I get the busy icon if I hover over the recycle bin. Eventually, things seem to go back to pre-busy state in that I don't get the busy icon, but the right-click menu never appears. I get a busy icon for the recycle bin even if I shut down browsers, etc.
2. right-click on the time and date in the lower-right portion of the screen, in an attempt to launch Task Manager. If instead I do CTRL-ALT-DEL I get launch Task manager immediately.
Maybe related: if I bring up Control Panel - System Properties - System Protection, the 'Protection Settings' table says:
"Available Devices
Searing"
forever.
The System Restore button is grayed out.
Occasionally, I get the busy icon in other cases, but I have yet to find it repeatable.
When I get the busy icon, it is only on the application mentioned, above. I can generally operate a (3rd party) browser with no problems.
Task Manager reports the sort of numbers I'm used to seeing when things are running normally:
1. ~50% CPU usage (due to browser).
2. ~25% memory usage
3. 25% disk usage
4. 0% network usage
I now have gotten things into a mode where the desktop is semi grayed out and shows the busy icon if I hover the mouse over the desktop. Also, I get the busy icon if I hover over the 3rd party Start button or any of the app buttons on the task bar (this is the bar just to the right of the Start button; I hope I'm using the right term).
I have a windows 8.1 dell laptop ,for some reason system restore is not creating points manually or automatically, when I try to make a restore point manually the working bar just keeps moving at the sane time though I noticed in the device manger a generic volume shadow copy entry will show up with a yellow mark beside it ,I have tried maybe 10-15 times to uninstall this and try system restore again ,but this keeps repeating itself,
I have also went into safe mode but system restore points can't be made under safe mode, I did the repository thing where I rename that folder to old and reset repository in safe mode ,same result .
so after I did windows updates after a long time (it's for a good reason that I am not updating) the notebook failed to start correctly. After the windows loading screen, only different tones of black were flashing - probably bad graphics driver. Anyway, I managed to do a system restore. Although it said it wasn't successful, it works But now some programs won't start. From Adobe, AfterEffects starts without problems, but Photoshop and Illustrator has an error: [URL]
When I try to uninstall Office completely, the set-up window doesn't even come up. And what's worse... when I run a new installation from a disk, there's an error too. [URL]
I've never come across something like this.. I don't know what to do.
Edit: So I managed to uninstall Office through a 3rd party software.. but I still have trouble installing it back (a different error now). I run as administrator and have full user rights on the folder..
My main problem is that I accidentally uninstalled MS Office earlier today from my Dell Inspiron which I bought in 2012; the second problem is that I can't do a system restore to get it back to the point before the accidental un-installation. I'm on Windows 8. It keeps telling me there's something wrong but when I run a check on the C: drive, everything comes up fine. I opened the computer in safe mode, do a system restore and same thing happens - error.
I don't know if I can locate the original MS Office card that I received when I got the computer, to re-install the program, which is why I'm in a bit of a panic right now.
A month back I accidentally deleted the wow6432 node from my registry under system_user. I believe this is the root of all my problems. Once I did that, my toshiba c885 D 64 bit would not boot. I forced the computer to shut down and pressed f12 to get to the system recovery options. I then restored to a point before my blunder. Well, my laptop worked for a while and then magically the screen goes black and will not reboot. I did sestem restore a few more times since I could get a little bit of work done in between restoring and the screen turning black again. After I was fed up with having to run system restore every other day, I decided to run system refresh to keep my files but reset everything else. After restoring I am getting the same problem and find myself again running system restore every other day just to keep working.
My questions are if I completely reinstall windows 8 and start from scratch, will this definitely solve the problem? I thought system refresh would have worked, so I'm not sure. Also, are there any other available options for me to fix my computer without starting from scratch?
My laptop (Dell Inspiron 2013 64-bit) was playing up today and instead of restarting it, I foolishly clicked on the option to "refresh the pc". Little did I know that this would remove all my current programs....
I decided then to do a System Restore. Now, all my programs are back, however, the majority of my programs such Firefox, Microsoft Office and such will not even open!!!
I would just like to know if there is anyway to get these programs running again without having to reinstall them all?
My Toshiba laptop/Windows 8.1 installed a VLC Media player & Malware bytes today. I was instructed to Restart as 'drivers not working properly' & since then have been on the Automatic Repair loop. It says it cannot fix it - log file: C:WINDOWSSystem32LogfilesSrtSrtTrail.txt, & I tried a few System Restore points but that just says -
System Restore could not access a file. This is probably because an anti-virus program is running on the computer . Temporarily disable your antivirus program and retry System Restore. You can try System Restore again If you continue to see this error, you can try an advanced recovery method.
Thing is I can't get into Windows or my laptop to disable the antivirus program.
I don't have any CD or DVD & no product key as the disc has been misplaced.
When I try clicking the start button, it doesn't work. I move my mouse to the right side of the screen, and the bar doesn't come up. Same with moving my mouse to the top left corner of the screen. I checked the properties by right clicking the task bar. The corner navigation options are checked off to show them when I move my mouse to the different corners.
I created a new user account on my PC (running Win 8.1), and the mute button on my wireless keyboard does not work on the new account. Pressing the mute button causes "Mute" or "Unmute" to appear on the screen briefly, but the sound does not mute or un-mute. The volume up and down buttons work, and if I log into my old user account the mute button still works there. It only doesn't work in the new account.
I Google a subject and get a list of sites, select one and read. To return to the list I click the back-button, the screen goes blank and I have to press the 'windows' key and select Google again which brings the list back on screen. Frustrating waste of time. How can I activate the back-button?
I'm having a problem with getting the mouse wheel button to work correctly in 8.1
I've switched to left handed use to alleviate shoulder pain.
Before this I had the mouse and keyboard center installed. I use a cheap USB keyboard and a microsoft USB optical wheel mouse. Configured for the right hand, everything works correctly. The right button is the normal select, the right is context and I configured the wheel button to double click.
When I switch to left hand I lose the wheel button double click. The select / context buttons are properly working, but when I click the wheel it appears to be the same as a context button click. I thought maybe the settings got messed up when I switched the buttons so I tried setting the wheel button to another function (open charms in this case). That works. Switched the wheel button back to double click and it goes back to open context menu.
I uninstalled and re-installed the mouse and keyboard center. That made no difference. Seems like a bug here.
On, this is on a new (mid-april) HP laptop so there is a touchpad that I almost never use because I generally have the mouse, keyboard, and external monitor attached with the lid closed.
Dumb question - if I panic and have to do a system restore or system reset using the install DVD for Windows 8 what will happen to the Windows 8.1 version I just downloaded and installed?
I have a Lenovo 580 laptop with windows 8.1. Months ago I installed the Windows 7 desktop. The START button has suddenly stop working - i.e., nothing happens when I click on it. I have shut down and restarted the computer but that hasn't worked.
I have windows 8.1 and cannot find system restore.The last windows update has changed some things on my computer and I would like to go back to an earlier date.I search for the restore,but only get my bookmarks file.The update has changed my zip files icon to a sheet of paper that I cannot open or extract. There is a system restore. I should add I have the classic shell not the original windows 8
I tried to put my computer in safe mode through system configuration and when I rebooted the computer will not start. It simply does nothing, I hear the HD start to work and the light flashes but nothing, it doesn't show anything on the monitor. I do not have a system restore disk either.
I made a system image from Windows 8.1 using Windows' own system image feature. I seem to be unable to restore it. I booted with the Windows 8 disc, and told it to restore from a system image. It found the image, ran a few minutes, then failed because of version mismatch (?). Not before hosing the entire system, by the way. Luckily, I was well backed up.
I booted with the Windows 7 disc, and it didn't even see the system image (on my external HD). It saw my Windows 7 system image and restored it just fine, and here I am.
Anyway, is there some trick to restoring a Windows 8.1 system image? I am not running Windows 8.1, so I can't generate a repair disk that way. Is there one available online somewhere for download?
I wonder whether one or more of 13 recent Windows Updates has caused an issue. I can use System Restore to take my PC back to September 7th, three days before the Windows Updates were installed (there is just a Java update that has taken place since that I would have to carry out again). Alternatively, I can uninstall the Windows Updates one at a time or all together to see whether that rectifies the situation. Is there a preference? Should I uninstall from the highest KB number downwards if I uninstall the Updates one at a time?
I am using Windows 8.1x64 in UEFI mode. My motherboard is Gigabyte H77M-D3H. My hard disk is configured to use AHCI. A few days back I needed to use system restore from my repair disk because of a system crash. To my horror when I selected System Restore from my Windows repair disk it showed-:
"To use System Restore, you must specify which Windows Installation to restore. Restart this computer select an operating system, and then select system restore."
Now I don't have multiple Windows installations but I do have Debian Linux x64 dual booted with Windows 8.1. the Debian Linux also boots in UEFI mode. Is this problem caused by the fact that I am dual booting ? Has Linux dual booted, check if you can system restore from the windows repair disk.
I can perform a system restore from the inside of the OS fine. But I need it working from the outside also. What I have tried is running diskpart from the repair disk and selecting my partition on which Windows is installed and then running system restore but this had no effect. Can I boot up windows and then select to boot from my CD ? Like, before Windows completes booting I can have the repair disk boot up or something. Could it be that I am booting my CD in legacy rather than UEFI ?
PS-: My Windows 8 was upgraded from an installation of Windows 7. But I have already deleted the Windows.old folder in C drive.
Having tried unsuccessfully to program Task Scheduler (in 8.1), I found at the above site in Windows 7 forums a shortcut for a script which supposedly simplifies manual creation of a System Restore point. However when I use it the Restore Point created with the script carries the notation "Install" in the list of Restore Points.
I recently had to do a system restore through the Dell System Restore programme, however now it appears I cannot activate Windows 8 - I get the "Windows cannot activate right now. Try activating Windows later".
I have tried entering manually through a command prompt but all I get is an error 0x8004F80B. How to resolve this?
My windows 8 pro install messed up n i have almost 2.8tb of stuff on my drive on a 3tb hd. I have an identical hd as a backup which i have (an apparently successful) a backup of my system from a couple of weeks ago on. I had set the system to do scheduled backups of the system (set to backup a system image of efi partition and c. There were a few times where i was trying to get other things done and the systemwas running slow so i cancelled the backups when i noticed them running. The software stopped the backups (seemingly successfully).
As i say my system messed up - i came home to find out it was no longer downloading (as i had left it doing when i went to work) but was on a blue screen (bsod?) saying the system needs to be restarted. Since then it didnt work well at all and after dskchk reported that several sectors were damaged so it was moving data to spare sectors (or whatever it generally reports when this happens) there were a lot of files messed up or reported as deleted when doing a file recovery scan with recuvva.
So i decided to restore the backed up system image from the other hd. Incidentally i tried mounting the vhdx backup image from that hd via windows explorer which then reported "the disk needs formatting" and didnt get any success mounting via disk management either (it mounted in the app but didnt show up on windows explorer and if i tried to access info on it via disk management it reported the same"disk needs formatting prompt".
So when i booted my win 8 dvd it didnt work cos the dvd wasnt an efi booting version so i had to boot from a usb version with the efi bit included.
I formatted the system drive and chose to do an image restore. It started doing the restore (apparently) but every time i came back to it later i had the follwing error:
"Re-image your computer
The system image restore failed.
Error details: The requested system device cannot be identified due to multiple indistinguishable devices potentially matching the identification criteria Ox80073B92"
It took me so long to set up my system n i have a lot of my own data on there too. The system drive I formatted was created in diskpart and then re formatted with "format" command (as it created the disk in raw mode) so now it is ntfs mode (uncompressed).
I was on my samsung laptop last night, and I found a folder called "Searches>Indexed locations". I saw it was taking up some space so i went through some of the files seeing that some were Type:Shortcuts. So I deleted them to free up a bit of space thinking "it's only a shortcut, can't harm it". Now some icons are missing from my windows 8 start screen and some programs have become inoperable because of missing files. I tried System restore to bring some of it back, it was going ok, then when it tried to restart, showed the samsung logo, then just blackscreened for 4+ hours. It was on , but blank. Haven't been using the laptop long so I don't really know the specs on it.
It came with no DvD/CD for me to use to format the laptop and I cant get it on to boot it up right for me to format it to begin with.
I atleast do know the graphics card was an AMD Radeon HD 7460
Can't seem to access Bios either.
One thing I forgot to mention which might have something to do with it, is I was using a custom windows 8 theme, because microsoft, being as stingy as they are, from what i assume does not enable you to have your own theme, so I had something called the "ribbon disabler and UXTheme Cracker" to use a custom windows 8 theme.
Just recently I was using my computer when an error appeared saying I had a drive error that needed to be fixed. I clicked the error in the system tray and then the computer restarted in order to fix the drive error. Well, I went into an "automatic repair" but then it froze on the "select your keyboard layout" screen. I then tried the "refresh your PC" option, but it wouldn't work saying that the hard drive was locked. I then tried to restore the PC to a restore point but it wouldn't let me do that either. As a last ditch resort I tried to use the "reset your PC" option which I gather is just a guided reformatting of the hard drive but it wouldn't let me do that either, saying that the required partition wasn't there. I took it into a PC repair place and they said the hard drive needs to be wiped, that the registry is corrupted or something along those lines. When booting from the windows 8 CD I tried to go into the installation menu and it won't even accept the product key on my package.
All I can really access is the command prompt. I guess I just need to reformat the hard drive and perform a clean install of windows. How to do this reformatting? I've never done it before and don't want to screw it up. I'm not worried about saving data on the computer, nothing really important on the drive that isn't already backed up on my laptop.