ok my computer fucked upand wouldent load past the windows screen (it keeped just restarting) so i did a system restore off a partition (running xp home edition btw) i says it backs up the files on the computer before the restore but i cant find them anywere? any ideas? are they gone? or should i just pull the hd and use other sorces to get the files back? i need those files from before.
thanks Jvv

people keep telling me to delete system32... im not sure just passing it along

I heard that's a good one.

how old is your comp? if its like 3 years old and you havent upgraded anything on it, toss it and buy a new one.

or find a friend that has an XP disc and just wipe your HD and reinstall windows.

if you need files back i'd suggest doing a repair install of windows. that won't wipe your hdd.

there's a way to do a system restore when the os won't boot but I forget off the top of my head and it's never usually successful anyway.

ok any good advice here? rev? any computer people?
thansk

the computer doesnt happen to be an HP or Compaq does it? HP and some other brands have a special recovery partition that you can boot to which it looks like you did maybe? You need be careful here though because you can choose to do a system RESTORE which just loads up one of your restore points and wont mess with any files changed before the restore point was set. Or you can do a system RECOVERY which wipes the drive and completely reinstalls the factory operating system. If you did the recovery and not the restore then your files are most likey lost.

Did you have to do the whole windows setup all over again and notice that all the pre loaded "bloatware" software was back on it again? Or did it just come back up to your normal desktop?

It is possible that your files are there and just need to be recovered. Usually when restore software "wipes" the drive it doesnt actually zero out all the bits it just marks all the bits as being writeable. It'll then start to copy data back to the drive as if it was empty. You can recover the files on the drive that weren't overwritten by basically restoring the link to those files. Most recovery software can do it. Just google for drive recovery or file recovery or look on download.com

This man speaks da troof. I didn't realize you may have been talking about a proprietary program that may reimage your system drive, wiping everything.

Have you tried installing Bonzi Buddy?