Windows 7: need help... very urgent

system details: Win 7 professional 32bit OS

problem:

my OS got corrupted. need to reinstall it.

i ahve installed many applications. its a pain to reinstall all those applications and drivers after i reinstall OS. is there a way i can backup only applications and drivers and not any OS component in my C drive??

i tried to use builtin backup feature. unfortunately it backs up everything in c drive including windows files.



pls help me out.

thanks

Hi,

Your best bet is to backup everything using the system imaging technique. The reason for this is that if you reinstall the OS, and then try to restore the backed-up applications, things will not work very well since the newly installed OS registry entries have no knowledge of the previously installed applications. I hope that makes sense.

If you use the system imaging technique, you create an image of the entire system : OS, registry and applications. If you choose to restore the image, then you bring everything back across onto the PC in perfect working order - importantly, the registry still correctly informs the OS about the applications in a way that everything still works.

There are many programs to use for imaging, but my own personal preference is for Macrium Reflect FREE.

Currently, it sounds that since you already want to do a reinstallation, the only choice is to reinstall the applications. Depending on the state of the corruption, you might attmept a sfc /scannow command from the command prompt. See this tutorial below, to try that:

SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker

Regards,
Golden

thanks for speedy reply....

unfortunately, the OS which is not installed is corrupted. if i backup now and restore later, all those corrupted windows files will be also restored right???

Hi,

I'm not sure what you mean. How can the OS be corrupted if its not installed?

Can you explain what you mean by that?

Regards,
Golden

let me try to explain....

6 months back i installed win 7. (which is now corrupt) didnt take backup before.

now, if i take backup of corrupted c windows files now ( even the corrupted windows files will also be part of backup. right?) and later if i restore this image after fresh install of OS doesnt it overwrite clean OS (which is freshinstall) to corrupted windows files (which will be in backup)????

pls dont feel bad about my questions... i am bit of a newbie into all these

Hi,

Don't worry about the questions - we were all newbies at one time or another

OK, so Windows 7 is still installed on your PC, but it may be corrupted. What you need to do, is to run the sfc/ scannow command - this can sometimes fix these corruptions, depending on how bad they are.

Please follow the tutorial posted above exactly, and then post back here to let us know how it went. After that, we can discuss a backup strategey.

Does that make sense? If you need help, just post back here.

Regards,
Golden

thanks mate..

will run sfc command and will post the results....

thank you for ur patience.

No worries - post back here when you are ready.

Regards,
Golden