Reinstalling Vista

[BigLar]

My Acer Aspire Laptop is acting awfully funky with a substantial number of programs, I think there may be a problem with the OS:

1. My HP AIO can scan in color just fine, but B&W crashes the app. HP tech service walked me through the super-secret reinstallation to no effect.

2. Can't get Chrome to run.

3. IE 7 and 8 don't launch, but Firefox and Safari are fine.

4. Number of other odd hangs, blips, etc.

So I thought I would try to reinstall Vista, but hoped not to have to reinstall EVERYTHING. The recovery disc I made from the computer looks like it will reformat the drive, so that's not too good.

I just got Acronis 11 from da Egg, but it doesn't look like I can simply back up the applications and reinstall them over a new installation of the OS.

It seems to me that one could easily do this in XP (or was that Win95?).

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.



Moved from Software For Windows to Operating Systems.

AnandTech Moderator
mechBgon

 

[RebateMonger]

You can use Acronis to make a full system backup of your PC when it is running properly. Then you can use it to restore your system next time.

There is no backup software built to just back up applications. Some apps can just be copied and later pasted back and will run, maybe with a few modifications. Some apps won't run at all unless completely re-installed.

You need to either "fix" the computer or back up your data and re-install everything. Once you've done that, you can start making Acronis system backups.

 

[Tom Scruffy]

I'm not sure what version of Vista you're running but the Ultimate version has an excellent built in backup utility that will take a complete image of your Vista partition and store it, making recovery a breeze (the OS plus all apps, pictures, documents etc). After the first image, it only increments the backup with additional items since the last backup.

I use a 320 GB hardrive in an external enclosure and store the backup image to this, disconnect it and then put it on the shelf above my computer so I always have a backup no matter if the computer blows up! I have this external removable hdd partitioned in half and I store an Acronis image of my other PC (which runs XP) in case that one has an issue.

I don't think the basic versions of Vista have this, but Acronis works great in their case.

As RebateMonger has said, though, these backups have to be done on a working system. That way you have a working system to restore.

I had to use the Vista backup the other day when I partitioned a hard drive in half and installed Fedora9 on the other half, instead of hitting the correct prompt on install, I inadvertantly formatted the whole drive and erased my Vista system. The restore was as easy as installing the Vista disk and pulling the info off of my other disk, it restored everything very quickly including all of my partitions.

I back up a copy about every week or two.

 

[BigLar]

Unfortunately, I'm in Vista Home Premium. Sounds like I'm going to have to do brain salad surgery and then recover the applications as best as I can...

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: BigLar
It seems to me that one could easily do this in XP (or was that Win95?).

The guaranteed ability to simply cut-and-paste application directories from one PC to another pretty much went away when Windows 95 came out. Microsoft encouraged developers to use the Registry rather than WIN.INI or local configuration files.

 

[BigLar]

Sic transit gloria...or something like that