System restore points completely wiped out

Hello,

I've had my lenovo R61 Thinkpad, running Windows XP Pro, since June 20th. I've been installing updates and software slowly and carefully, making restore points along the way.

I live in a rural area and had purchased DVD-R's to create the recovery discs, only discovering when I got home that that was only possible with CD-ROM's, which I was only able to purchase today. I created all of the discs required both to access the Lenovo tools and to restore the laptop to factory condition.

Tonight I went to create my daily restore point before shutting down for the night and discovered, to my horror, that all of my restore points are gone. I have done nothing to the settings whatsoever. I at no time turned off the system restore, and when I checked the settings, the box to turn off system restore was not checked. The disc space to use is set at 17, 489 MB.

What on earth could have happened here? Something like this could have been an utter disaster if I had experienced any sort of problem.

This did happen on my desktop PC a year or so ago because System restore was creating restore points for both my C drive and my D drive (which is a recovery drive and is locked and impossible for anyone or anything to change anyway). The D drive on that PC is very small so when there was no longer enough space on that drive for system restore, all of my restore points for both drives were eliminated, which came as an utter and devastating surprise to me. On that PC, I was able to have system restore NOT monitor D drive any longer.

The recovery drive on this laptop is totally hidden from me, however, so I don't seem to be able to tell system restore to ignore this drive if it is not already.

This is unacceptable to me to have my entire system restore points wiped out when I've had the system for less than 2 weeks.

Can anyone please tell me...is this related to my having created the recovery discs today, or is it something else?


....OK, update to this...I was looking back in some other posts on this topic, and I went to event viewer after reading one of the other threads. There is indeed an event and it looks like it occurred during the time I was in the middle of creating those discs. At that time, system restore stopped monitoring the volume, it says.

I have created a restore point and I am going to reboot and see if it is still there.

My settings all say system restore is on, so hopefully it's back. Maybe system restore tried to run while I was in the middle of burning those discs. Darned thing should know better, eh? But it seldom has a chance to run on its own. If this laptop isn't being used, it's in standby, so I've been creating restore points manually.

I'll update after the reboot.

 

To see if the system restore is working,install some program witch require restore point,like java 1.6.06 update.

 

I have rebooted and the restore point I created just prior to the reboot is still there, so the service is running once again.

I went to Event Viewer (BTW, is there a simple way of getting there, other than using the help and support and searching for it) and while my laptop was burning the recovery CD's, it looks like system restore tried to kick in and had a problem. This is the event:

The System Restore filter encountered the unexpected error '0XC000000D' while processing the file 'recover.ini' on the volume "Harddiskvolume2'. It has stopped monitoring the drive.

I wonder why system restore tried to run when obviously the computer was far from idle...? Oh well, at least I know what happened. I had posted this on a Lenovo forum, and I'll go follow up over there. I had come here thinking I would get more general info about system restore, and reading the other threads was very helpful. I posted my experience in the hopes that it would help someone else.

The laptop took probably 30+ minutes to burn all those CD's...This could serve as a warning, I guess, to anyone else that if you are engaging in a lengthy disc burn, check your system restore points when you're done.

 

"went to Event Viewer (BTW, is there a simple way of getting there, other than using the help and support and searching for it) "

Click Start, right click my computer, click manage, in system tools, click Event viewer

 

Goran, I think you and I posted at about the same moment.

Baklogic, thanks! That's just what I was looking for. That is SO much easier!

 

No problem .

 

Thanks for the info about the hotfix, baklogic.

I haven't had the lenovo long and I'm still in the process of applying updates. I don't like to install and update a whole bunch of stuff all at once and I'm rushing the lenovo as it is compared to my usual of 'one at a time and let 2 problem free days go by before applying the next' type of thing. With the lenovo, I'm installing 3 at a time and leaving one good day between. Maybe the hotfix for the system restore is on that list--I've still got 50-some Windows updates to go.

If that restore point hotfix isn't on my list, I'll go looking for it.

I wrote a CD today, ran a restore point first.

The lenovo is running beautifully...A few days ago I had an error message come up when I closed Opera, but once I went back to the default skin, the message never came back. It's so nice running a fairly new system that doesnt have a whole lot of stuff on it.