[docgoblin]

I searched your forums, and many others, but didn't see this exact problem, so I am once again turning to the experts. My neighbor had a power surge last week and their E-Machines computer wouldn't boot to Windows (XP Home). They brought it to a local, well established repair shop. They asked them to try to get it back to where it was, but if they couldn't to just try to back up the hard drive, and they'd do the E-Machines restore to get it to orginal state, then they'd restore the backed up files. They didn't hear from the repair shop for a week despite many phone calls and promises for a return call. They finally went in there yesterday and asked what was going on. They were told that they couldn't get any info because the tech that was working on their computer wasn't in. At that point they asked to have the PC back and they'd bring it to someone else. The owner got very nasty with them, but finally gave them the computer and 5 DVDs with the old files on it (charging them 80.00 for them).

When they got it home the computer wouldn't boot so they brought it to me. I found that the repair shop had done the E-Machine restore without asking my neighbor first. I restored the video drivers so I could get a full boot to Windows. Everything seems to be okay exept that I have no idea how to retore the files backed up onto the DVDs into the C drive. There are almost 20 GB worth of files here. Everything from My Documents folders to pictures, system files and drivers. I tried the Windows backup/restore application, but it doesn't recognize the files on the disk as backup files (no bkf extension). How can I get these files back to where they originated on the C drive? There were originally three user acounts in Windows. The repair shop set it up with just one "User" designation.

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It depends how the backup has been done and with what programs the shop have used. Clearly this hasn't been done with Windows Backup so something else has been used.

The easy solution would have been for the shop to use Nero and burn the files as normal; this way you could just copy the files back yourself.

What exactly have you got on the disks?

[Neil Jones]

It depends how the backup has been done and with what programs the shop have used. Clearly this hasn't been done with Windows Backup so something else has been used.

The easy solution would have been for the shop to use Nero and burn the files as normal; this way you could just copy the files back yourself.

What exactly have you got on the disks?

[pip22]

Windows Backup/Restore only recognises files that were backed up using Windows Backup because the backups are compressed using a Microsoft proprietary format to make the backups take up less space than if they were uncompressed.

It's a fair bet that with 20Gb of data the files have simply been copied to the DVD discs with no compression, leaving you to sort out what goes into whose folder by copying them back manually.

To be fair to them, however, even if you had done the recovery back to the original factory setup yourself, there's no way you could do that and expect all those user accounts to somehow re-appear if they didn't exist when the PC was was first bought.

At least they did back up your data before doing it, but I agree it is going to leave you with a mammoth task getting it all back where it belongs.

[docgoblin]

Yes, I agree. They definitely just copied files and folders to the disks using a burning program. I just thought there might be an easy way to restore these files (mainly the documents and such) to their original location. I'll just tell them that they will just have to grab what they really need off the disks and move them back into the computer. Thanks for the help.