System restore error - can't open SR never mind use it?

dalchina said:

Here's how to (most of the time) avoid having to spend time seeking solutions, technical help, and not being able to use your PC.

Use disk imaging routinely. As we constantly recommend to users, you can restore a disk image - which could be all the partitions comprising Windows- relatively quickly, painlessly as a routine procedure- without technical help.

Can help you recover from a failed disk (new disk needed); ransomware, unbootable or uncorrectable situations to a previous working state. Also acts as a full backup.

E.g. Macrium Reflect (free) + external disk for disk image set storage.

An in-place upgrade repair install is a fairly straightforward procedure, but it won't correct everything. It is however, like any upgrade, a major change. Thus we recommend using disk imaging to protect your PC here as well.

Appreciate this post - have downloaded the app and will use it for my system once I'm sure the lock ups have gone. I have an ext HD connected at all times anyway.

Bree said:

Take it from one who had done a repair install. It's not a nightmare, just boring and time consuming - more like watching paint dry.

The end result is a system that still has all your installed apps and documents, you'd be hard pressed to spot any difference. Virtually all settings are retained, the few that may change are things like Fast Start-up being turned back on (if you had turned it off before).

The only significant change (apart from things being fixed) would be about 20GB of space used by the windows.old folder, which would be deleted after 10 days anyway.

My apologies, I was being a little facetious. You're right, it's really not a nightmare, and can come in handy if needs must.

An in place upgrade repair is relatively easy and there is little downside.
Windows may be restored to default settings.
Then you would need to update any preferred settings.

Some of the links that had troubleshooted this problem had uninstalled 3rd party software or made registry changes.
The in place upgrade repair will allow you to fix many operating system problems.
Registry problems like problems with users, etc. would require other troubleshooting steps.
Running scannow, restorehealth, chkdsk, and an in place upgrade repair can be done as needed most of the time with little downside.

I decided to wipe the lot and start again. Suffice to say everything works again but I made the hellish error of forgetting to screengrab my start menu's tile layout and it's taking forever to remember what all 24 or so tiles were!

That aside, things seem to be working better - I also made the error of using CC cleaner. All registry cleaners are dangerous (and utterly unnecessary) and I think it was 95% of the reason my system cr*pped out.

dalchina said:

Ccleaner's fine otherwise- except I'd not use a registry cleaner myself.

It broke quite a few things outside registry cleaning tbh. I don't think it is fine - there is simply no reason to use a registry cleaner in this day and age. Maybe in the archive days of HDD OS and Pentium 2s, and earlier of course, but now on ivybridge or Coffee Lake and DDR with SSD - there's zero reason. Ditto defrag on such drives.

Now do make sure you have started using disk imaging routinely before it's too late, so you can rescue your PC yourself in many cases next time. E.g. Macrium Reflect (free).

System restore will also come in handy, but I'll run Macrium at least monthly.

reddice said:

I run Macrium every few days. System Restore is useless many times it failed on me when I needed it the most so now I leave it disabled and run a Macrium image backup many times a week.

I know this is going back a little, but can I use Macrium to transfer a windows install/image from one SSD to another?