When loading Windows, the system recovery question appears. Restore points and their purpose

Mar 3 2015

How to restore Windows 7 on a laptop, a black screen appears when booting, the recovery environment does not work, I deleted all hidden partitions, there is no original disk with Windows 7.

I spent a lot of time, tell me what to do now, or at least how to insure myself against such situations in the future, preferably without using paid data backup programs.

How to restore Windows 7 system

Unfortunately, there are many reasons for this problem, ranging from incorrectly written drivers, harmful effects of a virus, file system errors and ending with our erroneous actions when working with a computer. There is no need to be afraid of such problems, you need to learn how to deal with them effectively.

Let's think about how to restore a Windows 7 system, and also insure ourselves in the future against possible troubles using the backup and recovery tools built into the operating system.

We will learn how to restore Windows 7 without using third-party backup programs, even when System Recovery Options do not load and the F-8 button is useless.

It has in its arsenal a fairly powerful and good tool -> Recovery Environment, which is created automatically when installing Windows 7 in a hidden partition and contains five other tools that solve numerous malfunctions and problems.

Note: If you learn how to use Windows 7 recovery tools correctly, and this is not difficult, then you can do without additional and paid data backup programs.

You can launch the recovery tool by pressing the F-8 button on the keyboard immediately after starting the computer. After this, a menu will open in front of you: Additional boot options: Troubleshoot your computer, then Safe Mode, Safe Mode with loading network drivers, etc.

A small digression: Before selecting Troubleshoot your computer, try the simpler option - Last Known Good Configuration - in simple words, the operating system always remembers the last successful boot of the computer and enters this information into the registry.

If there are problems loading, Windows can remember the registry settings and driver settings that were used when the system was last successfully booted and use them if you select the Last Known Good Configuration option.

If this tool does not help, select the first -> Troubleshoot computer problems.

Next, we get to the Windows 7 System Recovery Options menu, this is what we need, this is where we can select the System Restore Tool we need, there are five of them in total, let’s take a closer look at how they all work.

The first thing to do is apply Startup Repair (Automatically fix problems that prevent Windows from starting).

Required digression: After pressing the F-8 button when booting the computer, you may not have the item > Troubleshoot your computer, but only Safe Mode and so on, the question arises why.

When installing Windows 7, a recovery environment partition is created automatically and is located in the root of the drive (C:) in the Recovery folder. You can also see in the Disk Management window - a separate, hidden partition of the hard drive, its volume is only 100 MB, it is used to store boot configuration files (BCD) and the system bootloader (bootmgr file).

You can see it under Computer->Management->Disk Management. Under no circumstances should you delete this partition (many people delete it out of ignorance), otherwise you will not have the recovery environment start, that is, you will not have the Troubleshoot your computer option, and in more severe cases, you simply will not boot the system.

In the lower screenshot you can see another hidden partition, with a capacity of 9.02 GB, this is a hidden recovery partition with factory settings on my laptop, yours may be larger or smaller. It’s also better not to delete it; if necessary, you can always restore Windows 7 from it.

What should you do if you do not have a partition with a recovery environment and when you press the F-8 button in the Additional boot options menu, the Troubleshooting computer option does not appear? How then to restore the Windows 7 system?

An installation disk with the Windows 7 operating system can help here. You can run the recovery tool by booting from the original Windows 7 installation disk, selecting System Restore at the very beginning.

If you don’t have an installation disk, then you can use the Windows 7 Recovery Disk (you can make it in any running Windows 7) in five minutes, then you can also boot from it and do the same.

So we finally got to the System Recovery Options, either using the F-8 button and the Troubleshooting item, or the Windows 7 installation disk or the Windows 7 Recovery Disk.

In the System Restore Tools Selection menu, select the first one:

Startup recovery-> there will be an analysis of faults that interfere with the normal loading of Windows 7 and their further correction for the normal loading and functioning of the operating system.

During the process, we may be warned that problems have been detected in the boot parameters, click Fix and restart.

System Restore-> using this function we can select a previously created system restore point, if we have it enabled, and roll back to the time when our Windows 7 worked and loaded perfectly, everything is simple here.

Restoring a system image-> I personally use this tool; if used skillfully, it can replace paid data backup programs. If you are interested, read on.

What's good about it? It will help when you don't have the original Windows 7 installation disk and you've deleted the hidden partition with your laptop's factory settings, but that's not all.

Sometimes there are situations when, for various reasons or due to the actions of a virus, you will not be able to boot the operating system at all, or many people ask How to restore the Windows 7 system, even if the menu with Additional boot options is also unavailable. Should I reinstall the operating system again?

Therefore, immediately after installing Windows 7 on your laptop or computer, using this function -> Restore system image, we create an archived image of our Windows 7 on the hard drive, and take care of it.

It is imperative to create a Windows 7 Recovery Disk (read below), it will help you use the System Image if the Advanced Boot Options menu does not load.

Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Back up computer data.

Select “Create a system image”.

In my case, Local disk (E:), if you have several hard drives in the system unit, then of course it is better to place the backup on the hard drive where the operating system is not installed.

By default, the data archiving program will automatically select a partition with the Windows 7 operating system; if you wish, you can add Local disks for archiving, as long as you have enough space.

Note: You may notice that I have two operating systems installed on my laptop, so the archiving program selected two Local disks.

Click Archive and the process of creating an archive with our Windows 7 will begin.

Created, it will look like this.

Now, if necessary, you can deploy the archive with Windows 7 to your computer in 20-30 minutes. It would be better if you additionally copy the archive with the system onto a portable hard drive, this will doubly protect you.

Let's imagine that we can't start Windows 7 and deploy the backup we created, let's do it together.

We launch the Windows 7 Recovery Tool by pressing the F-8 button on the keyboard immediately after starting the computer.

The Advanced boot options menu opens, select Troubleshoot your computer.

Restoring a system image

Use the latest available system image.

Of course, all our data on the Local Disk, where the operating system is now being restored, will be deleted, so you can first boot from any Live CD and copy what you need.

How else can you restore your Windows 7 system? Of course, using the Windows 7 Recovery Disk.

Let's create one that can be used to boot the computer; it will contain recovery tools that can be used to repair Windows 7 boot problems, as well as restore the operating system from the backup copy that we created in advance.

Important: For a recovery disk, the bitness of the system is important, you can use a 32-bit recovery disk for any 32-bit Windows 7, and a 64-bit recovery disk for any 64-bit Windows 7.

Let's go again Archiving computer data.

Create a system recovery disk, insert the DVD into the drive, click “Create disk”.

When the Windows 7 Bootable Recovery Disk is ready, put it in a safe place.

To restore Windows 7 from a Recovery Disk, you basically don’t need any working operating system at all.

You will only need to change the boot priority to the disk drive in your computer’s BIOS, insert a recovery disk into it and restore your Windows 7 using the archive.

Many here can draw an analogy with data backup programs, and this is correct, they work on the same principle, only their functionality is, of course, more convenient.

Recovering Windows 7 from a Recovery Disk. I show you how to do it. Let's say we're in trouble, we can't start Windows 7, when we press F-8 on the keyboard immediately after starting the computer, nothing happens.

We cannot get to the menu with Additional boot options and an error message is displayed. In this case, the system archive on the hard drive is not available to us. This is exactly the kind of trouble that happened to our reader Ilya, who wrote us a letter asking for help.

In this situation, many people reinstall Windows 7 from scratch, but not you and me, because we have a System Recovery Disk.

We insert it into the drive and reboot, set the BIOS to boot from the drive, as I said, the disk is bootable, the System Recovery Options program starts.

Press Enter until the prompt to boot from the disk disappears.

Automatically, the recovery tool running from the disk will try to restore Windows 7 to start.

If nothing works, select any tool, for example, try Restoring a computer using a previously created operating system image.

We use the latest available system image.

What other ways are there to restore Windows 7?

There is another little-known way to restore Windows 7 boot after a failure, and I’ll tell you about it. At first glance, it may seem difficult to many, but nevertheless it often helps me out.

The fact is, friends, that a very large part of the problems due to which you cannot boot Windows 7 lie in registry errors. And Windows 7 would not be Windows 7 if it did not have a mechanism that protects registry files. Such a mechanism exists and creates backup copies of the registry in the RegBack folder every 10 days, regardless of whether you have system recovery enabled or not.

If you cannot solve problems loading Windows 7, you should try replacing the existing (and apparently damaged) registry files from the Config folder with archived files from the RegBack folder. To do this, we will have to boot the computer from the Windows 7 installation disk or the Windows 7 recovery disk.

Boot into the recovery environment and select the command line.

We type in it - notepad, we get into Notepad, then File and Open.

We go into the real explorer, click My Computer. Now we need the system drive C:, pay attention, the drive letters here may be mixed up, but I think you can recognize the system drive C: by the Windows and Program Files system folders located inside.

We go to the folder C:\Windows\System32\Config, here are the active registry files, specify the File Type - All files and see our registry files, we also see the RegBack folder, in which every 10 days the Task Scheduler makes a backup copy of the registry keys.

So, we will replace the current registry files from the Config folder with backup registry files from the RegBack folder.
So, first of all, let’s delete from the C:\Windows\System32\Config folder the files SAM, SECURITY, SOFTWARE, DEFAULT, SYSTEM, which are responsible for all registry hives (my advice is to copy the registry hives somewhere before deleting, just in case).

In their place, let's copy and paste files with the same names, but from the backup copy, that is, from the RegBack folder.

Note: The SAM, SECURITY, SOFTWARE, DEFAULT, SYSTEM files cannot be deleted all together; delete them one by one. Then copy the same files from the RegBack folder in their place.

Friends, if this does not help, use Windows 7 file integrity recovery; if the operating system does not boot, it is done in exactly the same way as in Windows 8.

What else do we have left of Windows 7 recovery tools?

Memory diagnostics 7-> checks system memory for errors. Command line-> using it you can delete files that interfere with loading Windows 7.

I hope our article on how to restore Windows 7 system helped you.

Windows errors can be classified according to how harmful they are to the user. The most critical errors are those in which the system does not boot at all. There's nothing you can do about it - you'll have to restore the system completely. One of these errors is associated with the appearance of a black background on the display with the inscription “System Recovery Options”.

After which no further loading of the OS occurs. A user who does not have an installation disk at hand finds himself in an extremely difficult situation. There are many reasons for this failure: inoperability of installed drivers, dangerous manipulations by the user himself, file system problems, and even infection of the computer with a virus.

There is no need to despair. Windows 7 has quite powerful built-in recovery tools that can help you bring the OS back to life. All this toolkit is collected in one place - in a separate hidden partition on the disk - and it is called “Recovery Environment”. We will consider working with this toolkit in this article.

The recovery environment includes as many as five utilities that guard the health of the operating system. Learning to use it is very simple, all you need is a little care and perseverance. But all the efforts expended will pay off handsomely, because failures of this kind happen, albeit rarely, but regularly - not a single system is immune from them.

How do I run System Restore?

To start the OS regeneration program, you need to press the F8 key when starting the computer. Immediately after this we will be taken to “More download options”. A rather long list of options for further action unfolds before us. The first thing you need to try is to select the “Last Known Good Configuration” menu item.

With its help, you can try to return the OS to the same state in which it was before the failure occurred. The fact is that the operating system usually remembers its last working configuration in sections of the system registry specially designed for this. And if there is even the slightest opportunity to start the system using this saved data, then, of course, it should be used.

Let's say that this method did not lead to any results, and the error continues to appear again. Then you can take the risk of choosing the boot option in safe mode (with network support or not, it doesn’t matter). We will assume that this did not justify our results. There is only one thing left to do - select the “Troubleshoot computer problems” item. True, this menu item may not be on the list.

The fact is that the disk may not contain the above-mentioned 100-megabyte hidden partition, in which boot configuration files and a bootloader called bootmgr are stored. You can view this section using the “Disk Management” snap-in, which can be accessed from the “Computer” => “Manage” menu. We will assume that the section was not deleted or corrupted, which means that the menu item we need is present in the list.

If we are unlucky and the partition is destroyed in one way or another, then a boot disk with the system will help us. If you boot from such a CD and click on the “System Restore” inscription on the second screen, then the same tools will be available to us, only recorded on the CD (or bootable flash drive).

Be that as it may, we find ourselves in the Windows recovery options window. Here it is in the picture:

By clicking on the first link, we start the process of automatic troubleshooting. For users of the Norton system doctor package, everything will seem familiar. The program scans the system, digs up existing problems and sometimes asks you a question: to fix this or that problem or leave everything as is. To agree to “repair work”, you need to click on the “Fix” button. Here's what it looks like in practice:

This tool is able to cope with almost any startup problem if the system folder structure on the hard drive is not irreversibly damaged. It can be successfully used in almost all cases. Why are there so many items in the recovery menu? The fact is that there are other mechanisms for OS regeneration. For example, based on the use of so-called “restore points”.

Restore points and their purpose

Starting from fairly early versions (2000, XP), Windows has a rather interesting backup mechanism based on restore points. The user is invited to create such named points himself for any specific date.

Subsequently, you can transfer the “windows” to exactly the same state that they had at the time such a point was created. In this case, all changes made after the date and time the backup was created are completely lost. For example, all later installed programs disappear from the Start menu, interface modifications, desktop shortcuts, information about drivers installed later, and so on also disappear.

This is a very convenient method of insurance. Let's say you installed a driver for a certain device that completely crashed the entire system. If you roll back to the restore point created before installing the driver, Windows will start as if nothing had happened. The second and third links in the parameters window exploit the capabilities of this mechanism.

By clicking on the “system restore” option, a window opens listing all previously created points, from which you need to select one, and click on the “Next” button, and in the next window on the “Finish” button.

The option of restoring the system from an image is the most universal. With its help, Windows regenerates from a pre-prepared OS image file on disk. How to create such an image? Here are some brief instructions:

Go to “Control Panel” (“Start” => “Control Panel”).
In the “System and Security” group, click on the inscription “Archiving computer data.”
Then a window will open, on the left side of which there will be the inscription “Creating a system image.” Click on this inscription.
Next, you will be asked to select a disk partition where the image will be saved. Here you should not indicate the same partition where the operating system itself is installed - it is better to indicate some other one. This way there is a greater chance that the image will not be damaged along with the OS itself.
Double-click on the “Next” buttons and finally on the “Archive” button.
Our backup copy will be placed in the WindowsImageBackup folder on the selected partition.

Now, when we decide to restore the OS from an archive, we only need to specify its location. Like this:

As an alternative, you can create a system recovery disk rather than an image. And it's best to do both.

In conclusion, we point out the possibility of using the command line for our purposes. This method corresponds to the last option in the options window:

By launching an ordinary Notepad from the command line, you can get to the Explorer window. And in Explorer, manually restore system files from their backup copies on disk. We will not describe this process in detail, but simply point out this possibility. Now you are more or less armed against the system recovery options error in Windows 7 and you know what to do in this difficult situation.

“I explained that if it detects boot problems, Windows 7 automatically launches the Startup Repair Tool, which performs diagnostics with little or no user intervention and, in many situations, allows you to repair an unbootable system.

After this article was published, many users shared in the comments their less than satisfactory experiences using Startup Repair in . On the other hand, many wrote on the contrary that it helped them restore normal operation of the system. For those unlucky, I would like to remind you that Startup Repair only solves some problems, including missing and damaged system files.

As I mentioned in the previous article, if Startup Repair fails to fix the problem, it displays a System Recovery Options menu with a list of tools you can use to diagnose and restore your system. In this article, I will tell you how to call this menu yourself and describe each tool presented in it.

Calling the “System Recovery Options” menu

You can access the System Recovery Options menu in different ways, depending on your specific situation.

If Windows still starts to boot, you can try to access the System Recovery Options menu manually from your hard drive.
. If Windows doesn't even start to boot, you can call up System Recovery Options by booting your computer from the Windows 7 installation DVD.
. If you have a System Repair Disc, boot your computer from it and open the System Recovery Options menu. I'll tell you about creating a system repair disk another time.

Let's say Windows starts loading, but doesn't finish. To access the System Recovery Options menu in this situation, turn off the computer and then turn it on again. After the initial boot, when you hear a beep indicating that Windows is starting to boot, press and hold the key.

The Advance Boot Options screen appears (Figure A). Select the Repair Your Computer option. As the description at the bottom of the screen suggests, this option displays a list of tools that can be used to diagnose, fix boot problems, and restore the system. To continue, click .

Figure A: Pressing the key when Windows starts to boot brings up the More Boot Options screen.

A message appears telling you that Windows files are downloading, followed by a download screen with a green progress bar. After a while, a dialog box will open asking you to select a keyboard input method (Figure B). Click Next.

Figure B: If you are using English, simply click Next.

The login window shown in Fig. 1 will appear. C. Use an account with administrator rights to log in.

Figure C: Use an account with administrator rights to log in.

After this, the “System Recovery Options” menu will appear, shown in Fig. D.

Figure D: The System Recovery Options menu lists tools you can use to diagnose, fix boot problems, and perform system recovery.

Options

As you can see, there are five options in the System Recovery Options menu. Let's take a closer look at them.

. "Startup Repair". If this tool does not start automatically when the download fails, it should be used first. Please note that it only fixes some problems, such as missing or corrupt system files. This tool does not correct hardware malfunctions - for example, a hard drive.

. "System Restore" This tool allows you to restore Windows system files to a previous state without in any way affecting your data files - emails, documents, photos. To provide this capability, the utility constantly monitors the state of the operating system for significant changes, which include the installation of applications, drivers and updates. If such a change is anticipated, the utility automatically creates a restore point - essentially a snapshot of the system state, including important system files and certain registry fragments. System Restore stores several different restore points at once, which allows you to roll back the system to any of the saved states. Therefore, “System Restore” can also be used in case of boot failures - just select the latest restore point.

. “System Image Recovery”. If for some reason System Restore doesn't work, and you have a relatively recent image of the operating system on your hard drive, you can restore Windows from it. The system image includes all system files and settings, programs and user files. Please note that the entire system is being restored from the image, so all current programs, settings and files will be replaced by previous versions saved at the time the system image was created.

. Windows Memory Diagnostic. If, in addition to boot problems, you encounter application and operating system crashes or STOP errors, you can use the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool to check your RAM modules for problems. The diagnostic tool writes specific values to memory and then reads them back to ensure that the data has not changed.

. "Command Prompt" When you select this option, various command line utilities are available for diagnosing and restoring your system.

What do you think?

In future articles, I'll talk more about the tools in the System Recovery Options menu. Have you ever used them? Share your experience in the comments!

Any operating system can periodically experience various types of failures. Sometimes it’s such that the OS itself cannot be loaded. Now we will analyze the fix for the error of damage or modification of the winload.exe file.

There are 6 ways to solve this problem. One of them is reinstalling Windows. Most people, unfortunately, use this method. But in our article, we will not consider it. So let's move on to the rest.

The first way to resolve the error is using the Easy Recovery Essentials utility.

First you need to download the Easy Recovery Essentials utility. Please pay attention to the version of your Windows before installation.
The next step is to burn a startup disk or flash drive. To do this, the image of the downloaded utility is recorded using the UltraISO program.
Insert the ready-made removable media with the recorded image of Easy Recovery Essentials into the PC. Turn on your computer.
After launching EasyRE, select Automated Repair and click Continue. The scanning of files on the removable media will begin.

As your PC boots, the error should be corrected.

The second option is to load the last known known configuration.

Restart your computer.
Press F8 until you see a menu with boot options on the screen.
Select Load Last Known Good Configuration.

Press Enter and wait for the download to complete.

The third method is to launch the recovery system from the Windows installation disk. (System rollback)

To implement this method, you need a Windows distribution of your version, with a built-in function for resuming the OS.

Insert the disc into the drive or connect the USB flash drive to the connector with the recorded Windows.
When the message “Press any key to boot from CD or DVD” appears on the screen, press any key.

After loading the menu, click “System Restore.”

We look for an object with an installed OS, click “Next”.

In the System Recovery Options window, select System Restore.

Follow the instructions in the recovery wizard to select a rollback point.

Then click "done".

Method four: run chkdsk

Insert the removable media with Windows into the slot (disk drive).
When the screen displays the message “Press any key to boot from CD or DVD,” press any key.