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HELP! AMD Catalyst update broke my PC - How best to reinstall Windows 7?

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4wd:
Though the irony of my situation is that I will be creating an image of a corrupted Windows installation ...-dr_andus (September 08, 2015, 06:17 AM)
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The idea of the image is to save all the files that you forget about when you do a backup, eg. files on the Desktop, settings for programs (you can usually just copy them back into their AppData folder), etc - all the little things.

Plus it also gives you a baseline, you can always restore it and try some other method that might produce a better result, or restore it to another drive just to copy files off.

But if you can, copy all your Document stuff onto a separate drive which will be easier to restore from if necessary, (rather than mounting a backup image).

According to some of the comments on the www.winhelp.us website this can take several days...
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Sheesh, I don't think I've ever done an In Place Upgrade that took more than 3 or 4 hours and most of that was updating Windows after it had re-installed.

It may pay to disconnect from the network before you start so that the Windows installation process doesn't go searching for updates, which can slow it down a lot.

dr_andus:
4wd, thank you very much for all your advice, it's really very helpful.

tomos:
Just make sure to do at least one full disk image before starting, ... because if you lose any files during the process you should be able to mount the backup images to recover them, (at least with Paragon or AOMEI Backupper [..]
-4wd (September 07, 2015, 08:09 PM)
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did this lately with AOMEI Backupper (free version . created image backup + mounted to recover files). I restored OS partition from image a couple of times as well. Was much relieved that everything worked, as I hadn't done a restore of an image in years.

dr_andus:
Well, looks like my PC is well and truly messed up. I just tried to do my first AOMEI Backupper backup, and if I choose in the settings VSS (Microsoft's backup technique), I get this error message:

Failed to enable VSS. It may be caused because VSS service is disabled or there is no VSS service. Please check and try again.
Information Code:4140
The backup driver works improperly, you could restart the computer to solve the problem.
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and if I choose AOMEI's built-in technique instead, I get:

Information Code:4140
The backup driver works improperly, you could restart the computer to solve the problem.
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I guess I'll try to restart the system, and if that doesn't work, I'll uninstall the AMD driver and AVG manually (as suggested by some of you above) and try again. I thought I could unistall those two after the backup, but maybe it has to be other way round?

mouser:
My philosophy has always been: When in doubt, backup your personal data and docs, and then reinstall the OS from scratch.
Ideally this is done on a new hard drive in case it was a hardware fault on the hard drive (and because it lets you leave the old OS/drive alone).

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