Well, I'm talking to Diana right now...

qbynewbie

qbynewbie

Pre-takeoff checklist
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Qbynewbie
I'm talking to Diana on her iPhone... her main computer is dead (we suspect cat involvement), the storm has moved her satellite antenna so that is aligned with the Phoenix Lander on Mars and she no longer has dial-up access.

Her computer is able to be booted (kind of) but she has lost all of her data, at least temporarily, including both her marbles and her email addresses.

She wants you all to know that she isn't really, truly, purposefully ignoring all of your emailed inquiries and pleas but is truly at the mercy of dead technology.

Anyone who happens to be skilled at recovering a lost registry with XP home is eagerly sought to help us get her back online.

Her data is still intact on her drive. Her photos are there, her book is there, her itunes are there and she can log in as Diana on her machine. However, I suspect the registry is corrupt because the user Diana is not connected to prior files belonging to that user.

We'll keep trying to restore this over the next day or so but any expert help would be greatly appreciated.

:goofy:
 
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Brian, thank you so much for helping me! :yes: At least you got me to the point where I can find the files a round-about way and got the book chapters saved elsewhere. Maybe Joe Areeda can help me when he gets here in a few days.

I still think the cat did it. ;)

I wish I could find my emails and email addresses, but maybe that can be fixed.
 
I know a pretty good data recovery guy... but if the drive is intact, pretty much any halfway competent computer tech should be able to recover your mail.

Rich
 
I think we can solve her problems by restoring a registry snapshot from a few days ago. Unfortunately, I think that means using the Recovery Console. Joe Areeda will be out there in a few days and I think he'll be more comfortable doing that than Diana.

In the meantime, she can actually get to all of her files and has -- hopefully -- backed up most of them by now to an external USB drive.

But she was very concerned that people would think she was ignoring them. :)
 
If Joe can't figure it all out (I'm sure he can) bring it to Gastons and we'll work it out.
 
I'll do my best. I can certainly back up the current registry do a system restore. I may be posting request for help if it get much more complicated or the last system save is too old. I'm not that good at unscrambling the registry.

We're hoping to be there Saturday but long range forecasts say it might be Sunday.

Joe
 
Areeda said:
I'll do my best. I can certainly back up the current registry do a system restore. I may be posting request for help if it get much more complicated or the last system save is too old. I'm not that good at unscrambling the registry.

We're hoping to be there Saturday but long range forecasts say it might be Sunday.

Joe
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Joe,

I've got some pretty simple instructions that I think will do the job. If you're comfortable running the recovery console, it should be a pretty quick process.

If you want, I'll send you an email with the details.

By the way, I was going to call you to see if you wanted to go flying but decided I didn't want to cut into your Memorial Day holiday! I hope it was a good one. :)
 
Everskyward said:
Uh oh. My cats are at home... unsupervised. :eek:
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LOL... There's a real chance that her cats actually were involved; one of them was walking on the keyboard immediately before the problem occurred. :p

"It's midnight... do you know where your cats are?" :redface:
 
Brian,

Yes, please email me the instructions.

Things are very busy right now. I've been trying to finish up everybody before I get out of town for 3 weeks. So it would have been tough, but we may stop by and see you in New York, what is the closest hard surface runway to you?

So far so good. I had my first CFI student pass last week, now I can look forward to grand-students. I had a retest for a private (from another instructor) pass today. And 2 IR students scheduled one tomorrow and one Friday. Everybody is/was ready. I think I need to have these hard deadlines for people more often.

Joe
 
qbynewbie said:
However, I suspect the registry is corrupt because the user Diana is not connected to prior files belonging to that user.
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Could you explain what exactly you mean by this?
 
qbynewbie said:
In the meantime, she can actually get to all of her files and has -- hopefully -- backed up most of them by now to an external USB drive.

But she was very concerned that people would think she was ignoring them. :)
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Yea, I felt bad about not responding to some of those emails and losing their addresses.

Starting to try to back up the files now.

Thanks guys! :)
 
Areeda said:
I'll do my best. I can certainly back up the current registry do a system restore. I may be posting request for help if it get much more complicated or the last system save is too old. I'm not that good at unscrambling the registry.

We're hoping to be there Saturday but long range forecasts say it might be Sunday.

Joe
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Joe I think we can get you in that same hangar. Still no fuel at LLU. Do you like ribs? What kind of wine do you like?
 
Diana said:
Joe I think we can get you in that same hangar. Still no fuel at LLU. Do you like ribs? What kind of wine do you like?
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Thanks Diana,

We'll stop for fuel before we get there.

Ribs are great and Viveca and I like red wines but aren't picky.

Can't wait.

Joe
 
jesse said:
Could you explain what exactly you mean by this?
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Well, this is all by long-distance, but it appears that she can log in as Diana. She does not have a password set for it and says that she is logged in as Diana. However, it's not making the connection between the logged-in user and the files under Diana in the Documents and Settings folder.

I had Diana verify that the folder Diana was there and that her files are under it. All sounded like it was intact. However, when she logs in, she describes it as looking "just like it did when we first bought the machine."

Either she is actually logging in as another user or the system has lost some of the settings for the user Diana.

My plan was to ask Joe to find a very recent registry snapshot and copy those files back to the appropriate locations in the Windows\system32\config folder. This obviously cannot be done while that instance of Windows is running, so the easiest alternative seems to be to use the Recovery Console and I'd rather have Joe do that while he is there than try to talk Diana through the process -- especially since her other Internet connections are also down.

I do not believe that she has an Automatic System Recovery backup available. She and I discussed backups for a few minutes the other night. :D

I'm open to suggestions here. If anyone has a better plan, then I'll be happy to step back and let someone else help her.

I did ask her to copy as much of the material below the Diana folder as possible to the external USB drive. It has plenty of space available on it.
 
Areeda said:
Brian,

Yes, please email me the instructions.

Things are very busy right now. I've been trying to finish up everybody before I get out of town for 3 weeks. So it would have been tough, but we may stop by and see you in New York, what is the closest hard surface runway to you?

So far so good. I had my first CFI student pass last week, now I can look forward to grand-students. I had a retest for a private (from another instructor) pass today. And 2 IR students scheduled one tomorrow and one Friday. Everybody is/was ready. I think I need to have these hard deadlines for people more often.

Joe
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Joe,

I'll send you the information I was looking at.

I'm glad you're getting away for a vacation -- you deserve it. The closest hard runway to me is Glens Falls (KGFL). Unfortunately, I'm going to be in Oregon for a fair part of June. When were you thinking you'd be in my neck of the woods?
 
If necessary,Joe, M17's 100LL is $4.89/gal right now. We're about 52 sm east of Diana's/LLU.

Also, there's a really good bar-b-que place downtown, and I know someone who would be glad to be an impromptu chauffeur :yes:.

Lemme know if you guys come over this way.
 
qbynewbie said:
Well, this is all by long-distance, but it appears that she can log in as Diana. She does not have a password set for it and says that she is logged in as Diana. However, it's not making the connection between the logged-in user and the files under Diana in the Documents and Settings folder.

I had Diana verify that the folder Diana was there and that her files are under it. All sounded like it was intact. However, when she logs in, she describes it as looking "just like it did when we first bought the machine."

Either she is actually logging in as another user or the system has lost some of the settings for the user Diana.

My plan was to ask Joe to find a very recent registry snapshot and copy those files back to the appropriate locations in the Windows\system32\config folder. This obviously cannot be done while that instance of Windows is running, so the easiest alternative seems to be to use the Recovery Console and I'd rather have Joe do that while he is there than try to talk Diana through the process -- especially since her other Internet connections are also down.

I do not believe that she has an Automatic System Recovery backup available. She and I discussed backups for a few minutes the other night. :D

I'm open to suggestions here. If anyone has a better plan, then I'll be happy to step back and let someone else help her.

I did ask her to copy as much of the material below the Diana folder as possible to the external USB drive. It has plenty of space available on it.
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I'm not sure I'd even bother trying to recover the registry. All the files should remain there. It is just a matter of figuring out which user she is now logged in as and copying the files to the appropriate locations. E-mail / Address book should not be lost.
 
qbynewbie said:
When were you thinking you'd be in my neck of the woods?
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One of the big themes of this trip is that we will not make firm plans, just wake up in the morning and say "want to spend another day here or check weather and go someplace else within about 700nm?" It will probably be the week of June 8. We want to see the coast of Maine if the weather cooperates.

jshawley said:
If necessary,Joe, M17's 100LL is $4.89/gal right now. We're about 52 sm east of Diana's/LLU.

Also, there's a really good bar-b-que place downtown, and I know someone who would be glad to be an impromptu chauffeur :yes:.

Lemme know if you guys come over this way.
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Thanks Jim, it will either be Sat 5/31 or Sun Jun 1. We may just do that.

Joe
 
Areeda said:
One of the big themes of this trip is that we will not make firm plans, just wake up in the morning and say "want to spend another day here or check weather and go someplace else within about 700nm?" It will probably be the week of June 8. We want to see the coast of Maine if the weather cooperates.

Thanks Jim, it will either be Sat 5/31 or Sun Jun 1. We may just do that.

Joe
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Rats!

I'm taking the American Flyer's ground school at SMO on the 6th, 7th and 8th, then heading home for 16 hours and then flying back to Oregon for eight days. I would have enjoyed seeing you and hosting you and showing you a bit of our side of the world. :(
 
jesse said:
I'm not sure I'd even bother trying to recover the registry. All the files should remain there. It is just a matter of figuring out which user she is now logged in as and copying the files to the appropriate locations. E-mail / Address book should not be lost.
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Jesse,

I think you're exactly right. Diana and I just spent some more time on it. I had her try to copy her original user folder (from Documents and Settings) and the copy failed. We created a new user first and then logged in as that user before attempting the copy. But she got a CRC error when it attempted to copy the file ntuser.dat.

She is now copying the "my documents" folder (one level below) to her mybook drive. Then I'm going to see if we can copy all of her pertinent information to the new user that we created.

In order to avoid locking issues on either side, we created a third user, which she is logged in as currently. If all goes well, we might be able to replicate the essential part of her old user under the user we created and thereby give her access to most of her old information.

Unfortunately, this process won't completely replicate her old experience because ntuser.dat contains the hkey_local_user portion of the registry. I don't know what she's got on this machine but surely there will be application-specific information that would be nice to recover.

Are you aware of any utilities that might be able to recover a corrupted ntuser.dat?

Thanks!
 
Under the "all's well that ends well" department, we got Diana pretty much back in business.

We tried copying the original user profile to a new user but that process was unsuccessful because of the CRC error. So I walked her through the process of copying all of the remaining (i.e., non ntuser.* files) files to the new user manually. When it was done, she logged in as the new user and gasped audibly on the phone as she saw all of her desktop files restored.

It wasn't perfect because registry information was lost. An example was the desktop background she had set was not copied. But her files, menus and application data was recovered ok. Since she uses Thunderbird and Firefox, she was in much better shape than if she used IE and Outlook or Outlook Express.

She says her satellite is now working in the mornings, so she'll be getting emails out to many of you tomorrow morning.

Joe: unfortunately, you'll just have to be content with having a nice visit with Diana and Tom without the thrill of recovering lost data. :D
 
WOW! I can't believe it! My music is back, email and email addresses are back, photos are back, music is back. Brian, thank you, thank you, thank you! You were so sweet to help me, and so patient.:yes:

"Lessons Learned" edition available tomorrow. :)
 
Diana said:
WOW! I can't believe it! My music is back, email and email addresses are back, photos are back, music is back. Brian, thank you, thank you, thank you! You were so sweet to help me, and so patient.:yes:

"Lessons Learned" edition available tomorrow. :)
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Twas nothing... I'm glad it worked out.

Now don't forget to start a thread asking for opinions on the best method for you to back up your system. :yes::yes::D
 
Areeda said:
Viveca and I will just have to make the best of it.

Joe
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Well, I've been on the phone with India for over an hour. They will come take the satellite off the roof sometime :dunno: but until then reception is poor to none, so it's back to the iPhone. Joe, when you get here, you can use my iPhone to get online if you want. :)
 
Areeda said:
So far so good. I had my first CFI student pass last week, now I can look forward to grand-students. I had a retest for a private (from another instructor) pass today. And 2 IR students scheduled one tomorrow and one Friday. Everybody is/was ready. I think I need to have these hard deadlines for people more often.

Joe
Click to expand...
I know this is not the best place to post this but I have to post it somewhere.

The IR guy passed today. The last one will be taking his check ride while we are on our way to Santa Fe. He better pass.

Joe
 
Areeda said:
The IR guy passed today. The last one will be taking his check ride while we are on our wayto Santa Fe.
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Congats to you and your student Joe. :) Hopefully now you can start to relax and enjoy your vacation/honeymoon. :)
 
Areeda said:
I know this is not the best place to post this but I have to post it somewhere.

The IR guy passed today. The last one will be taking his check ride while we are on our way to Santa Fe. He better pass.

Joe
Click to expand...

LOL

Have a great trip, Joe. I'm sorry I'll miss you in NY.
 
Areeda said:
I know this is not the best place to post this but I have to post it somewhere.

The IR guy passed today.
Joe
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Man, my heart started going there, so soon after Bob Bruneau! I'm glad that you clarified in the next sentence!:yes:
 
Grant or Jesse, if either of you guys make it down here for my fly-in next weekend, would you help me with the new problem which is similar to the old problem?
 
Well, thanks to Brian, again, the old computer is almost back to normal again. :yes: This time whatever made it crash caused it to disassociate (that may not be the correct technical word :redface:) with the programs that were in there, but it wasn't hard to add them back in. As soon as I installed Thunderbird again all of the emails and folders and email addresses came back up again. Yay!!! :goofy: Same with the other programs. Since Brian helped me do it the way he did, I've managed to access all the information that was there before it messed up. :happydance::happydance::happydance:

Thanks again Brian! :cheerswine:
 
Thanks Brian! Diana, I'm really sorry we didn't get to it while I was there. :(
 
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