Have you ever found yourself in a situation where after installing some particularly appealing application, a new video driver which promises astonishing effects with your new PC game, and after a reboot the system simply refuses to start? Or maybe you enter your credentials as you already did probably a million times, and you then end up watching a box which tells "Applying computer settings" but this lasts forever? Being quite curious towards technology and technical gadgets (not necessarily meaning Vista gadgets ), and due to may job where I have to often install and test on my machine sample application I get from customers, unfortunately I found myself in this situation more than once and luckily in those occasions I've been saved by the by System Restore feature available in Windows XP.
When a while ago I decided to switch on Windows 2003 as my primary working machine, and I then needed to restore the system to a earlier point, I discovered that System Restore is not available in our server platform... but I didn't want to give up that "parachute" which saved me so many times (but not in that occasion... that is a lesson I learnt in the hard way... ).So I decided to dig into this issue with a few questions in mind: why this is not available in Windows 2003? Could this be installed anyway, somehow?
I finally come up with the following procedure which worked great on my machine but I must warn you: read this very carefully before doing anything I describe here, and do it only if you feel comfortable working with the System Registry, the Services snap-in etc... As you can imagine, neither me not Microsoft can be considered responsible for any damage caused by this procedure, which is not supported by CSS (Customer Services and Support, formerly known as PSS).
So, if you're still with me, to start we need a WinXP installation CD (doesn't matter is Home Edition or Professional). In XP system restore is installed in syssetup.inf under the inf.always section. If you have XP installed, you can open up %windir%\inf\syssetup.inf and search for "[Infs.Always]": you'll see the section XP looks at for installing system components. You'll notice it has sr.inf, this is the inf for system restore. For Windows 2003, if you look at syssetup.inf you won't find sr.inf. This doesn't mean system restore won't work in server 2003, it just means we don't install it (now sure why).
Now we have to right click on sr.inf and select "Install", to install it on Windows 2003. If you have XP installed on another machine/partition you can simply right click on it; if you don't, extract \i386\sr.in_ from the XP CD to a folder of your choice, then right clink on it and select "Install". It will ask you where the files are, so point to the XP CD. When done you'll be prompted to restart the system: do it.
That was easy, now comes the tricky part. After restarting the system you'll get an error saying that the service could not start, specifically this is error 1068: this means it cannot run under the service is on. If you look at it in services.msc console, the path of the executable will be "C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe -k netsvcs". This got me thinking so I opened up sr.inf, and found this line:[SRSvc_delreg]HKLM,"Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SvcHost","SRGroup"
I opened up regedit, and this registry key didn't exist. So it seems the sr.inf doesn't register system restore to run under the network services group. Using the above registry key as an example, I opened regedit and went to:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SvcHost. On the right side I saw netsvcs. I double clicked on it, but could not find SRService (this is the name for system restore).
On a hunch, at the bottom I added SRService, rebooted, and this time got no error on startup. I opened up rstrui.exe, and System Restore opened fine. I also had a System Restore tab in System Properties now, too. I was able to make a restore point fine, then restore the computer to it without any problems. So in the above registry key double click on netsvcs, and at the bottom of the list type in SRService (not sure if this is case sensitive or not).
Very creative tweaking!
Great! it does work on my XP Box.
However, it will discard all your previous restore points.
Thanks,
Antonio,
Uhm... possible... did you run it on your XP box? I didn't test on it but just on Win2003 because I wanted to have the System Restore feature there, I already had it on my XP machine... anyway thanks for let us know! :-)
Carloc,
Yes, I had to do it on my working XP box, because I've caught some naughty sort of virus that simply inhibited/destroyed my System Restore.
I did it with the help of an XP CD, as you mentioned above, to restore the missing parts, such as the driver 'sr.sys'.
The outcome is: now I can use the System Restore again.
Maybe this will help somebody in the future.
Thanks again.
Hey,
It hasnt worked for me, I did the all process and i even got the restore tab in the systems but when i try to run it says system restore is not able to protect my computer and i should restart and run again.
Do i need to add SRService as key, string, binary or word? which one? and where exactly? is it inside netsvcs or as a key in it???
please help, i like my win2003 server and really need this feature here.
Thanks
Hi Leonard, after selecting the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SvcHost key, on the right pane you'll see "netsvcs" which is a multi-string value; you have to double-click it and at the end of the string list you have to add "SRService".
See the two screenshots: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/222/468106018_561ed3df27.jpg?v=0 and http://farm1.static.flickr.com/187/468106012_055fae062c.jpg?v=0
Hope this helps...
Hi Carloc,
Thanks alot it just work fine after the screen shots and the process you gave it to me. Hope we you can always be available for other problems related to windows 2003 and may be microsoft and other computing things in general.
Thanks once again.
Leonard
hey i have this problem with my windows 2003 server,
I created a password for symantec antivirus so that any time i want to run i have to put the password. This is becoming a nuisance to me since anytime i want to update or even scan my computer i have to put the password, unfortunately i have forgotten the place where i set the password. Is it in windows group or its in the antivirus? Does someone know this?
I'm not completely sure because I don't know the Symantec antivirus that well, but I think you should start investigate this with them; Symantec support should be able to tell you where they store those passwords
now my restore isnt working... i created a restore point on 22nd april 2003, but i tried today but its not working... could anyone know what the problem is.. i have a few programs which have conflict in my computer and i want to get rid of them..
I recenty updated my windows 2003 server and it did fail have way because i didn't have enough space in c:\ the hard drive so what i did is i tried to uninstall service pack 2 and start all over again but i couldn't and then i went to add/remove programs and the service pack 2 is there but still says in the windows updates that i am missing it. so i can not do updates any more in windows 2003 server. what do i do
Sorry, I'm not a platform specialist, this seems an issue my colleagues from the CSS Platform team may help you with... have a look at http://support.microsoft.com and consider opening a support call to get the help you need.
HTH
Budy,
It's very important tool for any administrator. So, you will find a way to restore widows.
It very work full for me.
To cut the long story short, during a recent implementation of Cumulative Update 6 and 7 on a particular
Did all the above, service is running - but when i click on "System Restore" nothing happens. Anyone have any ideas?
Tony - tonypirog@htomail.com