Day 3 of Windows

Installing and reinstalling

from JoeUser Forums

This past Sunday I discovered a trojan on my main desktop PC.  Later on that day I discovered it had also made it's way to my laptop.  It had disabled some Windows applications, and just to be on the safe side I decided to just backkup my data, and restore a disk image with Acronis True Image.  Doesn't sound too bad?  Yeah right..

The disk image for my desktop appeared to install correctly, but after a few hours of working with it, it appeared something got corrupted in the process.  This of course, after I spent hours updating, installing applications, and updating again.  So I just said forget it, and did a clean install from my Vista Ultimate disk and started from scratch.

Next, I tried to restore my laptop image, and of course the disk image was corrupt.  Something must have gone wrong on my external drive at some point which screwed up both disk images.  It's now Monday and I'm going a clean install of Vista on both my desktop and laptop PC's.  The amount of reboots between updates is just incredible.

So here we are on day 3 and I almost have my laptop ready to take a new disk image.  While that is being done I will finish installing applications and setting up my desktop PC, and then image that drive again as well.  So 3 days of nothing but installing and reinstalling.  I can't do a bunch of things I was working on because I need the computers, so all I pretty much have to work with is my Mac which I'm writing this on now.

I guess that's just the way it goes in a Windows world.

 

vist windows acronis
1,995 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I feel for you. Good luck.

My son uses my wife's laptop to access the internet. He and his friends started using Aim last fall and 3 times in fairly rapid succession I ended up having to reformat her drive and reinstall her programs. Each time I traced it back to Aim. I believe at least one of the nastier malware apps installed with it. No more chat for him.
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Yeah, it seems even with a firewall, router and AV, crap still gets in.  Thats why no one uses my PC and I'am careful as can be, in where I go. ;) 
Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I've had real good luck with the complete system back up and restore that comes with Ultimate. You might want to give it a try once you get your system loaded back to the way you like it.
The only drawback I see with it is you have to restore to the same size drive you created your backup of. If you wanted to create a back up of a small drive, remove it and upgrade to a larger drive it will not restore to it. No matter what, it could'nt hurt to have an extra back up other than the one you created with Acronis True Image.
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Island Dog:

I use ATI Home 11 to make backups of my Vista system, too, so I'm curious about your corruption problem. You said you tried to restore from an external drive, right? Did you create the backup on that drive originally? Or, did you create the backup on a different drive and then copy/move it to the external drive?

I'm asking because I've read posts on the Wilders Security Acronis forum from folks that said doing backups directly to an external drive bypasses error detection schemes that are in place when you write to an internal drive. So, I back up to an internal drive first, and then copy that to an external drive -- an extra step I'd like to avoid if it's not needed.