Possible to Sys Restore from a separate drive?

I have two Hard-Drives both formatted with Windows XP, and I have the WinXP disc. Is it possible to do a system restore on drive (F from drive (C?

Don't give me that! I can't log into any of my users on the (F drive, and it's because SOMETHING happened last night (I do not know).

Are you saying with that CD I can use restore points from another drive? It has nothing to do with internet connectivity.
Also, it doesn't log me back in/out, when I click on any of the user icons, the computer freezes and I have to reboot.

I am saying with that CD (ERD Commander) you can use restore points while the system is offline (not currently booted), as long as SRPs exist on that system

I am not sure if it would work if you copied over from one drive's "System Volume Information" directory to the other, but it would be worth a try if that is what you are trying to do.
But if this is your plan, then you are asking for trouble, unless the other drive is a copy of the current drive at a previous point in time. I say this because SR will completely REPLACE all registry hives with the ones it saved.

You could of course back up the current HDDs reg hives and then replace them after the SR executes, but again it depends on what you plan to fix by doing an SR.
I am guessing you are trying to fix the freezing problem you described?

If so then it must be some service or driver that is causing the issue. (Or possibly a userinit.exe problem)




(A) Does this freeze problem cause everything to lock up, like the mouse stops moving?
If not, then at the logon screen press Ctrl+Alt+Del twice and see if the "classic" logon dialog appears. If so type in a username and see if you can logon that way. Or type in Administrator and see if that works (if you have a hidden Administrator account on there)



(B) If that doesn't work then try safe mode...
Does this freeze problem happen when you boot into safe mode?
If you do get into safe mode without it freezing, I would check the integrity of system files, as well as your HDD:

1. Win+R --> cmd /k sfc /scannow
(have your windows disk near by, in case it asks for any compressed files from the i386 folder)

2. Win+R --> cmd /k chkdsk /r
(it will want you to restart to execute it, so just wait until sfc is does checking for system files)

3. If neither commands fix it, then go back into safe mode, and do a System Restore if one exsists.




(C) If you cannot get into safe mode, or doing those 3 steps dont fix it then...
Have you tried doing Last Known Good Config ? (which will load a different set of drivers the last time that windows successfully booted and the user logged on)
If not, then try that.




(D) If LKGC doesn't work then you need to to plug in that HDD to another computer and do this:
1. Check to see if the following files exist in the system32 folder of that drive (Ex: F:\windows\system32):

userinit.exe
logonui.exe
explorer.exe
lsass.exe
services.exe
svchost.exe

msgina.dll
msv1_0.dll
SAMSRV.dll
SAMLIB.dll
LSASRV.dll
RPCRT4.dll

Tell me if any of those do not exist.


2. Now I want you to check some registry locations. To do this, do
- Win+R --> regedit
- Highlight the HKLM (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) root
- File (mnu) --> Load Hive
- Now go the that drives (the broken one) system32 folder again. Look for a subfolder called config, and open that up. Then a file called SOFTWARE (it will be the largest one most likely)
- Click open and name it 1

Now, I want you to go to the following locations (I will say HKLM for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) and check to see if these values match

HKLM\1\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Userinit (REG_SZ) = c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe
UIHost (REG_SZ) = C:\WINDOWS\system32\logonui.exe
Shell (REG_SZ) = c:\windows\explorer.exe
Make sure there is not a REG_SZ value in there called GinaDLL



(E) If none of the above work (and all the files/reg values exist from step D), then I would say you need to:
1. Insert and boot up your windows disk. When at the blue screen, press R to boot to the recovery console. Once you logon to the installation (usually no PW is required) then do a chkdsk /r.
2. If that still doesn't fix it then it is time to get ERDC. Hopefully that drive does have a System Restore so that ERDC can execute it. If not then you will need to look around in the System Volume Information folder to see if you can locate and previous registry hives that we could manually replace
(If it comes to this where we do need to manually replace the reg hives after everything else has not worked, then I will give you further instructions)




Report back with the results, and what step you got to.