[StrayKat]

Either my mother or her cat seem to have unknowingly restored her computer back to factory settings this morning. Her data (from all programs) is gone. All of the programs that I installed for her are gone - Firefox, a few games, Photoshop, etc. Even her network settings had reverted back to factory settings.

Norton is almost finished doing a full scan and so far it has only found a couple of tracking cookies. I do not believe this is virus related.

System restore only had one restore point from 20 minutes ago, and it did nothing.

Any ideas on what happened or how to correct it?


Edit: Running Windows 7 on a Toshiba x775 laptop.

Edited by StrayKat, 04 November 2011 - 08:41 AM.

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Hello, and welcome to Geeks to go !

There's nothing to correct. If the machine was inadvertently restored to Factory condition then all the files you created and programs that you downloaded from the internet are gone. This is essentially the same as reformatting a hard drive. You will need to reinstall those programs from scratch.

Edited by zep516, 04 November 2011 - 09:14 AM.

[zep516]

Hello, and welcome to Geeks to go !

There's nothing to correct. If the machine was inadvertently restored to Factory condition then all the files you created and programs that you downloaded from the internet are gone. This is essentially the same as reformatting a hard drive. You will need to reinstall those programs from scratch.

Edited by zep516, 04 November 2011 - 09:14 AM.

[StrayKat]

Thanks for the welcome and the help. After my mother calmed down enough to talk and with some minor teeth pulling, it looks like she and the cat did reformat the disk. The cat seems to have walked over the keyboard and hit F12 at startup, and my mother did the rest.

Thanks, again. I will get to work reinstalling and salvaging some data from the old laptop.

[zep516]

You're welcome! Cats have an uncanny way of hitting the correct keys or combination of them. I have several cats and have to put them away at times when I'm working. It was due to a cat that I met my girlfriend, the cat had walked over her keyboard and flipped the screen up-side down, she posted to a forum somewhat similar to this. I answered the post, we became friends, and are now together 3 years now!!!

Edited by zep516, 04 November 2011 - 02:14 PM.

[DonnaB]

Hi StrayKat,

And I thought a flipped screen was bad! Oh my!

There is a program that you can install to help prevent this from happening. It is called PawSense.

Please click on and read the link above. Great program to have if your mother has a habit of letting her cats walk all over her and the keyboard as I do or if anyone has a habit of leaving the top to their laptop open when they walk away from it when cats are around.

There is also a way to configure laptop settings so that you can close the lid and it will not shut off.

To set a laptop to do nothing when the lid is closed:
Go to > Start > Power Options and in the left pane look for Choose what closing the lid does.

Next to When I close the lid click on the drop down arrow to the right and choose Do Nothing. Do this for both On battery and for Plugged in then make sure to click on Save Changes at the bottom.

Hopefully the above will help prevent this in the future.

Donna

Edited by DonnaB, 04 November 2011 - 07:02 PM.

[StrayKat]

Aww, you two, that's so sweet! What a happy accident.

Thanks for the info on PawSense. It definitely sounds like something needed here.

The lid might come later, after my mother gets a bit better at conserving power.

[peter99]

Once you have installed all programs and set the computer to your liking use the image program in win7.

Creating an Image in Windows 7

The new backup utilities in Windows 7 are actually pretty impressive and creating an image will be possible in all versions

http://www.howtogeek...e-in-windows-7/

[StrayKat]

Good idea! Thanks.