So, Was Going To Help a Friend With His Computer, and Here's What Happened

[SlowwHand]

He had a functioning computer. Slow, and he wanted to look at that and change OS from 7 to Vista, for his reasons.
I used CCleaner on it and it cleared out more trash than I had ever seen. Then we were going to try and address the change in OS.
When the attempt was made, it mandated that a Backup would be made. OK, we got some disks ready. It created a separate drive. "E" drive.
On this "E" drive are something like 85 zipped folders, titled 1-85.

He tells me that the PC won't do anything, when running "C".
He's unsure where anything is in the zipped folders and doesn't know what to do with something if he finds it. I tell him if it's a Program, put it in the Program folder.
What about the registry?

He's got another PC that he wanted to format, and I can't get that done either. I tried dos, I tried highlinghting C in My Computer and choosing Format.
Neither will let me.

Any ideas on anything?

[snoopy369]

Anybody tells me he wants to replace Win7 with Vista, I leave the room quietly.

The E drive is a backup, don't do anything with that whatsoever. If you replace Win7 with Vista you're going to have a totally brand new installation, generally speaking (unless you earlier upgraded from Vista to Win7 and saved things such that you can do a downgrade, but I am guessing not). So once your backup is taken, just book to the Vista installation DVD and let it do its thing, formatting C: from scratch (but leaving E in case you have to revert to the backup for some reason).

What do you mean he wants to format his other PC? Do you mean he wants to clear out the drive so he can toss it, or do you mean he wants to start fresh with a new Windows installation? If the former, it's easiest if you can take the drive out and install it in a second PC, then boot to the second PC's installation, then format from there. You can't format a drive that you're currently running Windows off of. You could also try booting to a windows installation CD/DVD, as that will generally let you into a repair console that has some DOS functionality, but I don't recall if format is an option from there. You could of course also tell it to format the drive as preparation for installing windows, and then just stop once it's done that.

[SlowwHand]

"C" now has none of his photos, documents or games. Would he have to reinstall games and copy the other from "E", once they're located?

[snoopy369]

Honestly I don't know what exactly is on E. If he was formatting C, then he should've not had anything on it he had any interest in keeping. You could certainly try restoring from the E backup, I've not had to do so before with that particular method of backing up so I don't know how that would work.

[snoopy369]

Just to be clear, the correct order of operations for installing a new OS is:
1. Take a full backup of the system, preferably with a real backup tool and not just the OS install disk's tool.
2. Copy anything you will want, document-wise, to a separate location, like a USB drive or another disk. Everything on the windows install will be deleted, so any documents you want to keep need to go somewhere else. Any programs will have to be reinstalled, so if you want to save their settings, do the same with their settings files as well (where applicable).
3. Format the HDD and install the new OS. It's almost never a good idea to try an in-place upgrade or downgrade (ie, one that does NOT include a full wipe).
4. Copy stuff back over, and install any programs desired.

If you didn't do these in this order, then (if possible) restore to the backup and perform these tasks in order again.

[SlowwHand]

There were some programs on the fuctioning PC that wouldn't run. Our intent was to do a Repair Install.
The CD prompted to backup. We both expected to start inserting blank CD's. It didn't turn out that way. The biggest problem is that he's trying to appease his step-daughter who has all these damn dumb games that he says she paid for to download from...somewhere.

The real problem is that the guy is just too nice. I'd have told the rest of the family to get f-ucked.

[loinburger]

Just to be clear, the correct order of operations for installing a new OS is:

1. Ask for help from somebody who knows what they're doing.
2. Follow their advice.

The wrong order of operations is:
1. Break everything.
2. Ask somebody to help you fix the thing you've broken.

[SlowwHand]

You're an idiot. I've never had a PC/OS decide all on it's own that it would partition itself and make backups in numbered zipped files. ****wad.

[loinburger]

Yes, clearly the magical self-willed computer is at fault, not the idiot who broke it. At least man up and admit that you ****ed up.

Ordinarily I'd offer to upload a repair CD for your use, but you'd no doubt use it to do something utterly stupid like wipe the disk's boot sector. Take it to a professional.

[loinburger]

For anybody competent who's interested in repairing a computer, the free tools I recommend are:

Sardu - Multi-boot CD/DVD builder. You'll want to include at least one windows Live CD with this.
LiveXP - Streamlined windows Live CD. Can be built using a free trial of Server 2003 if you don't have an XP ISO handy.
UBCD4Win - Much bulkier windows Live CD. I think this one requires an XP ISO, though you may be able to build it with the 2003 trial ISO instead.
Paragon - Backup software. With the newest version of Sardu you can easily include arbitary ISOs, so be sure to include this one.