*cough* XP has a fully functional backup/restore feature for a reason, one would most likely use backups if it was anything important (as is always recommended).
You mean System Restore? Yeah, what a nice program. Except Microsoft forgot to add one minor feature to it:
The ability to restore the system. Honestly I don't know what the hell System Restore supposedly restores, but it certainly isn't restoring key system files necessary for making XP not crash on startup in normal mode or within seconds in safe mode. ChkDsk, aka Fckdsk, manages to 'fix' the corrupted NTFS volume by deleting vast amounts of files automatically when it decides the indexes are incorrect - then once it's done cleansing the file system (of most of my files that is) XP loads and re-corrupts it again. I guess I could always boot using 'Use last working configuration' except for the fact that it considers BSOD on startup as a 'working configuration'. As it stands I'm probably gonna have to buy a new HDD, install XP on it, boot from that, then hope there's enough of a filesystem (and files) left to access and retrieve info off the other drive as a slave. Then I'll burn it all to CD and shift everything over to the first non-Windows OS I come across.
As for not having backups; I had the crazy notion that XP was stable and that running a system with no outside sources of software (ie. no possibiility of malware of any kind) from a non-administrative account would be sufficient to
not completely [censored] the system. One random crash later and colour me surprised. Actually I do have backups of some stuff, but it's completely disorganised and out of date since I had to shift it all onto about a dozen CDs (we're talking about GBs of data here) about 6 months ago.
Edit: I'm not trying to create a big MS-bashing thread here, I'm just seriously pissed about the situation and I had to get it off my chest somewhere.
