Windows Busy Circle - System Restore Button Is Greyed Out?
Jul 31, 2013
I'm running Windows 8 on an HP P2-1310.
Examples where I see the windows busy circle:
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).
My blue "busy" circle pointer icon no longer spins. It's not really a problem except I suspect that it is a symptom of a deeper problem? I have changed icons, rebooted, changed back, rebooted and still no spinning. I have done sfc and dism / restorehealth, but the circle still wont spin. There is nothing in event viewer that would point to anything related and I haven't changed any settings that would contribute to this.
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.
Today, my windows 8 desktop acted up for no reason. When I tried to install a program/software, it prompted for an Admin. Password. However, in the dialog box, there was no text box for typing in the Administrator password and OK button was grey out.
Tried to open an elevated command prompt box using "Run as administrator", no luck. Selection was grey out too. I could not enable hidden administrator account via "net user administrator /active:yes" from elevator command prompt. I also could not install any software because the Administrator password dialog box contains no text box to enter Admin password and OK button grey out. I could only clicked the Cancel button.
OS: Windows 8.1 Pro Processor: AMD FX-1400 Quad Core RAM: 8.00 GB Storage: 1.73 TB of 1.81 TB available System Type: 64-bit Operating System, x64 based processor
A while ago, my PC was having some lag issues that made the computer practically unusable. I found out in msconfig that I had almost all services running. I disabled many of the services, and I made sure not disable the necessary ones (i.e, Windows Audio.) I restarted my computer and there was a red circle with a white "X" over the audio icon. I clicked on the icon. A window named "Playing Audio" opened. On the window was a bar similar to the one shown while loading/downloading something.
Above the bar said "Detecting Problems" and then "Scanning for hardware changes...". This went on for about 10 seconds. After this, the window changed. At the top in blue was "Troubleshooting has completed". Under that was "The troubleshooter made some changes to your system. Try attempting the task you were trying to do before." In the center of the window was "Problems found-Hardware changes might not have been detected".
In the search bar, I typed "Manage audio devices". When I opened it up, the window told me that there were no audio devices installed. I have checked in Device management under "sound, video and game controllers" That I have sound drivers installed (AMD High Definition Audio Device & High Definition Audio Device.) I have tried multiple times to uninstall/reinstall the drivers to no avail.
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?
My MSI GE70 laptop with windows 8 64 has recently been having an issue while watching videos (whether it is a downloaded file or a stream) where the screen will suddenly go black and the sound will go away, but the cursor will still be visible with the spinning circle to show me it is working on something. It will just stay black and nothing will respond, even CTRL-ALT-DEL. The only way to fix it is to restart the computer by holding down the power button. It doesn't give me any error messages before this happens or on start up afterwards. It isn't overheating, and I didn't install any new drivers before this started.
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 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 .
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.
I just installed Windows 8.1 on my system (from Windows 8) and had to restore to an earlier time (to one from earlier today). The issue is that my solid state hard drive was reduced by about 20 Gigs! I even deleted the other restore points and rebooted, but my hard drive has about 136 gigs of space. Before the restore, it was 156.
Does windows restore really eat up this much hard drive space? Is there a way to get it back?
My son decided to reset his windows 8 laptop to original factory settings, during the reset process his mom decided it was taking to long and turned off the laptop.
Now when its turned on it shows the message "restoring your computer", this message will then change to "diagnosing your computer", the screen will then go blank and it start all over again.
I can boot it from a USB drive, but when I click on "repair" i get an error message that it cant repair the computer. When i try to run restore from the USB I get a similar message.
is there anyway to run the system restore from the DOS prompt?
I was using ccleaner to uninstall some software that I thought I didn't need. Apparently, I accidentally uninstalled one of the system files I believe. Now, when I rebooted it, there is no taskbar (just blue and the place where you have a clock is white and blank) and the desktop has no apps in it. Also, when I use alt+tab, the format looks entirely different. I remember the file I uninstalled was around 20 mbs. Afterwards, I tried using a system restore.
I have bitdefender, and as a result, it caused the system restore to fail. I decided to temporarily uninstall bitdefender (planning to uninstall it again later). However, when I tried to do system restore again, the icon had disappeared! (It says that there is no restore point) How do I redo the system restore?
A system restore did not work. PC "refresh" did not work. I've done a number of checks/scans (CHKDSK/ ScanDisk , sfc /scannow, Windows Defender, TDSSKILLER, and Malwarebytes Anti-Rootkit) without any threats/errors occurring (I know it's not an exhaustive list.). I'm at my wits' end.
Simply, I understand that "reset" (Reset Windows 8) supposedly (and I'll get to why I say that) removes everything and reinstalls.
Assuming this is a copy of the Windows 8 that was originally activated the first day I used my computer, I should be by the above definition be able to go back and rebuild what had been a system without this problem for about five months (length of time since purchased, approx.). I also have burned recovery DVDs from the first day of use.
There must have been a reason that "Refresh" didn't work. Is this Reset as good as the old reinstallation from discs that I'd done, for example, on XP in the past? Do I need to wipe everything or can I just do the quick (just remove files, not fully clean) reset?
I can't imagine anything outside of the OS causing my situation. Is there any way with "Reset" (assuming not an OS issue alone) that the problem can migrate to the new "installation?" I've never updated the BIOS or any such thing.
i have windows 8 when trying to use system restore it gets to the screen that says system restore is restoring files, but that's as far as it gets, I let it run today for 4 hrs. what can i do?
I was able to do it in XP. I created a shortcut to system restore and put it on the Start Menu. So much easier than the way Windows 8 works. Wondering if there's a way to do the same in 8.1?
