On 31/10/15 10:48, Nick Maclaren wrote:
On 10/31/15 10:22, Charlie Pridham wrote:

I am doing this on the machine as it appears in some respects to be
working normally, but if I connect anything with memory to any of the
USB or card slots it fails to find it and if I open "Computer" and click
on any of the external slots it shuts down and reboots so I cant do any
further back ups.

I had thought that as the hard drive was still working I could just drop
it into the new machine but I am now suspecting its the Windows coding
that is corrupted and I cant restore my back up because it wont read the
USB slots and "System Restore" doesn't work.

If I didn't want to save the data I could do a destructive restore to
the original but I have never had to restore from a back up and I am not
100% sure that having done that , that A; it would cure the problem B;
that the restore would result in me seeing exactly what I currently have
in front of me.

The machine is probably OK, but it is more likely to be a hardware
than a software problem. The fact that it crashes is because error
recovery code is broken more often than not.

Maybe, but it might be worth running FSC /scannow first to fix any
corrupted system files and see if that cures the problem.

Firstly, if you have never checked your backups, don't trust them.
You need to check that they can be recovered from and contain the dataI thinkI think
you need at intervals, and every time you upgrade your system. But
that's for next time.

Spot on! Maybe the word "Backup" should be banned from computing and we
should only talk about "Restore"...

What do you mean by card slots, and do you have a CDROM/DVD drive?
If so, the simplest technical approach is to boot a Linux system in
recovery mode, and see what devices are broken. If that's too tricky
for you, you need a competent shop or person to do it for you. Great
skill is NOT needed, but nor are people with Dunning-Kruger.

Why not just boot a Linux live CD (eg Ubuntu or Mint) and see if that
can access the hard drive and any USB port? If it can, then just copy
any important stuff from the hard disk to a USB memory stick. No need to
investigate broken devices or try to mend anything if that works. Once
the data has been retrieved, then either try mending what might be
broken or just DBAN the hard drive and dump the PC. As it's a Vista
machine it's probably around 10 years old, and more and more issues of
the sort Charlie has found will occur.

If it is what I think, it might be possible to replace a component or
add a daughter board - it depends on your machine - and dropping the new
disk into a new machine would definitely work. But it would be better
to copy the disk or get it copied, as disks don't last for ever and
newer ones are bigger.

I guess it might be possible to take out the hard drive and put it in a
powered external case with a USB connector, and use another PC to try to
read the disk contents and get anything of value off.

--

Jeff