OK, so yesterday I had to use the Rollback feature of Win Xp. Because I was already getting tired from 6+ hours of messing with my machine, I didn't unplug my data storage drives.

Bad move.

After the rollback, I found that half of the files in my mouse driver directory have vanished. OK, so I unpacked the stored archive with them and installed the thing.

That done, I went and tried to fire up Bloodrayne for a moment.
And then I went, like...

WAAAAAH!

Fortunately, I had a DVD with some recovery software and with help of one called something like "Paragon File Inspector", I managed to recover - it seems - all of the deleted files. Plus a bunch of files deleted earlier, as a most unwelcome bonus. :angry:

One problem: all have lost their names. :wallbash:

4 hours of work later, 3 of which included heavy swearing (and it would continue if my dictionary didn't run out; after that I just settled for "Bill Gates is Antichrist" ^_^ ), I managed to identify most of the stuff.

Right now I am downloading the install of DosBox 0.65 and Abandonia's copies of Flashback and Pinball Illusions (happens that the current copies of both are the ones I uploaded - exactly the same stuff I had on my PC)

After a calm analysis of the facts, it looks like the rollback didn't destroy all executable files, either. Why it left most of them untouched is beyond me, but at least I don't have to worry about recovering them. It also seemed to go exclusively after executables, config files and DLLs.

After all that stress, I am still not quite sure whether this was simply a bug in the System Rollback or indeed a malicious virus of some sort.

What can you tell me about that? Did you have any similar experiences?

Awhile ago I had to do a rollback and I only have 1 40gb harddrive. I did the rollback and the only thing that went msssing was programms I had insatlled thaty day (they wer spyware and luckily I removed the bad stuff out of em with ad-awarese.
I remeber chcecking basically every file on the computer and all my old ones that I wanted to keep were still there.So it may be a virus for you and minior spyware for me.
What im sayin here is I had used windows sys restore about 5 times and anything I lost was installed on that day. Unless of course a virus changed all those files date to created today.

realy odd thing happened to you, i use rollback often (i have a little sister so..) and it never deleted me something which was installed before the restore point.
btw iam monitoring my system drive only (c, with windows) you can set it in options it's little useless to monitor eveyrthing and it takes LOADS of memory.

I haven't removed the monitoring for those drives since the reinstall.
Also, after some checking, it seems that all the files it "ate" were in the Drive_D directory, where I moved all the content from the second partition of the HDD that had Windows. Happens I moved that half an hour before the rollback.

Thats strange.Is windows ond rive c: or d: because if its on c: then why would it delete files on drive d:. Its somthing bill gate will just never tell us. The logical explanation to me is a virus scan your computer for spyware malware and viruses.

Win is on drive C.

And I just found another oddity - the rollback has brought back a bunch of files I have long since put int approppriate "Sorted\..." directories. Grumph.

Ok so if you lost anything on drive d: since windows is on c; your windows is just doing what it does best doing things that are really random.

I never use system rollback, it's evil. It's disabled on all my systems. A better approah imho, is to have two partitions, c: and d:. d: is for data, c: for apps and OS. Install your software and make an image using DriveImage or Ghost. That way, if you mess something up, you can set the image. The data (which is the most important thing) remains untoched.

I know that doesn't solve your problem, but I've had so many bad encounters with the rollback, I always give people the above advise.

The problem here was that the image I made was after Windows Update, and some components installed at that time caused severe crashes. So I had to do a rollback to revert the OS to its previous state.

As a side note, I made a little experiment with the Rollback. Basically, putting some misc junk on Drive D, disabling rollback on all drives except C and performing it. Guess what? It ate the freshly copied junk.