File Repair is a free software for Windows that can fix corrupt file types. The program can repair the following types of files:

• Word documents: doc, docx, docm, rtf
• Excel speadsheets: xls, xlsx, xla
• Zip and rar archives
• Video formats: avi, mp4, mov, wmv, asf, mpg
• Image formats: jpeg, gif, tiff, bmp, png, raw images
• PDF documents
• Access databases: mdb, mde, accdb, accde
• PowerPoint presentations: ppt, pps, pptx
• Music formats: mp3, wav

Support for that many file types is one of the strengths of the file recovery software. It should be clear that the software won’t be able to repair every corrupt file type, as it depends a lot on the corruption or damage itself. A file that has a size of 0 bytes after a crash cannot be repaired by the application for instance.

File Repair can fix the following common errors:

• The format of the file is not recognized by the application.
• The file cannot be read
• The file cannot be accessed
• The default application for the file type cannot open the file
• low system resource errors, out of memory errors.

Here is how the repair works:

You select a single source file under “Select the source file to be repaired”. A click on the … opens a file browser that you use to select a file that you want repaired.

A click on start repair tries to repair the file. The file will be saved in the same directory but with a different file name. The original file is left untouched which means you do not need to create a backup of it before repairing it in the software.

The process log details the repair process. File Repair tries to read the document and recover data that is not readable anymore. This usually takes less than a minute to complete.

Users with multiple corrupt or damaged files need to add and repair every file individually, which is not very comfortable. Options to use the command line or a batch mode would be more than welcome.

Still, File Repair can be used if you are out of options and need access to a damaged file. The freeware can be downloaded from the developer website. It should be compatible with all recent versions of the Windows operating system. It was tested on a 64-bit Windows 7 system.

I received an email this weekend from someone who was running Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 in a multi-boot system. You might be surprised but this system actually makes it relatively easy to rescue a multi-boot system. But what if you’re running Windows XP or Linux and how would you rescue that?

Identifying the Boot files

On all new Windows systems you’ll find that in order to be able to install an operating system such as Windows XP or Linux, you’ll have to install that before Windows Vista or Windows 7. This is because of the new secure windows boot system. If you right-click on Computer in the Start Menu and select Manage from the context menu that appears you will bring up the Computer Management Console. Here you can click on Disk Management in the left-hand panel to see the hard disks and partitions in your computer.

You should have a 100Mb partition called System Reserved. This is where Windows keeps all its boot information. If you do not have this partition and are running Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server then that boot information will be store on the Windows partition itself (whichever one of these three you installed first). Do note though that this partition might even be on a separate drive to your copy of Windows.

Backing up the Boot files

The best thing to do when everything is working is to create a full backup of this System Reserved partition. If you use the System Image Backup feature in Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 to create a full backup of your copy of Windows then this partition will automatically be backed up and will be restored when you restore that image of Windows (any of them in fact if you have more than one).

You could also use a third-party disk imaging tool such as Symantec Ghost to back up just the System Reserved partition and even though these can be expensive, a search of computer magazine cover disks or a trip to downloads.com should reveal one you can use for free. You should create an image of this boot partition and keep it somewhere safe on your computer.

With this backup should your computer’s boot files become corrupt, simply restoring the System Image backup will reset everything and get your computer operating again.

Manually Backing up and Rebuilding the BCD boot file

I have another video which explains how to manually rebuild the boot files in Windows which you can see here. You could run through this and find that it successfully repairs the boot files. If you follow the instructions to get as far as making a backup copy of the BCD boot file, you can then copy this file out to another safe place on your computer when it’s all working. This means that you can copy it back should it become corrupt.

This method offers no guarantee of repair success but in conjunction with the other BDCEDIT commands I talk about in the video, offers you a fair chance of success at getting your system working again.

Repairing a Multi-Boot Startup

Okay, so let’s assume now that you don’t have one of these backups and your boot files are corrupt, how can you repair them? The only way to do this now is to repair them in order of ageso far as the boot systems go. This means that you should start first with Windows XP or Linux and then do Windows Vista or Windows Server 2003 and Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 last of all.

If you are just using Windows XP and Linux then the XP recovery console will be able to help you rescue your system, but this won’t work if you have Windows Vista or later installed as this introduced a new boot system that’s incompatible with XP and Linux.

You’ll need to reinstall the older OSes (XP or Linux, Yes I know Linux isn’t old, only its boot system!) as these operating systems don’t come with a startup repair system like newer versions of Windows. You can perform a fresh install over the top of your existing copy but do not format the partition. This will copy all your files in XP into a Windows.old folder from which you will be able to recover files and data.

With the newer copies of Windows you can then start by trying Startup repair again though at this point it’s probably not going to work. When time comes to reinstall try formatting the System Reserved partition ONCE and only on the first install. Windows XP and Linux won’t have used it so you can clean it out to start afresh. Then reinstall in the same way as with XP by performing a fresh install over the top of your existing copy without formatting the drive. This will put your old copy of Windows into a Windows.old folder from which you can rescue files.

The first time you install Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 this boot partition will be rebuilt and it will include the relevant information for XP and Linux if you have them installed as well. NOTE this time Windows may put the system reserved partition in a different place and has even been known to put it on other hard drives containing files or data. If this is the case you can move it, and I’ll write this up in a separate article this week.

If you do keep your files and data on a separate hard disk or partition then you can feel free to format the drives or partitions before reinstalling your copies of Windows as this will create nice clean installation for you and should repair any problems with the partition itself.

Conclusions

This isn’t an easy or quick process by any stretch of the imagination, however in the case of dual-boot systems that are either simple or complex, it ought to get you up and running again. Good luck.

It was an old computer, an AMD Duron 800 Mhz with a 40 Gigabyte hard drive, 256 Megabytes of RAM running Windows XP. The first thing I did was to lookup the Stop error message that was showing when the bluescreen appeared only to find out that it was most likely a hardware related problem.

My guess was that it was either the motherboard, the RAM or the hard drive that were leading to the bluescreen so I had to test them to find the cause for it. Oh, before I started I made sure that every piece of hardware that was not needed to run the computer was disconnected, like sound and network adapters but also secondary drives and onboard components.

The only way to do this was to burn a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD which contains tools to analyze the hardware and boot it. The disc contains all kinds of utilities to scan, analyze and repair hardware connected to a computer and it is especially effective when it comes to RAM and hard drives.

I decided to run Memtest to test the RAM of the computer which turned out to be fine. The next tool was the Drive Fitness Test designed for IBM and Hitachi hard drives. It turned out that the hard drive had damaged sectors which the tool was able to repair.

With the errors corrected I tried to boot into Windows again and it happened to load just fine. If that would not have helped I would have tried some additional tools to test the CPU for instance. I would have used the cloning tool to clone the hard drive and format it completely to start the installation a new.

The Ultimate Boot CD is an excellent utility if you want to test major PC components without having to install software on the computer.

I never did send in my computer for repair yet but I would be very cautious about it because of the privacy issue. The computer technician will check the hardware and software installed on your computer which means that he will use software that can read from your computer.

I’m not sure about you but I have stuff on that computer that I do not want a computer technician to see. Here are a few guidelines that could help you protect your privacy and data when bringing in the computer for repairs.

• Check if it is necessary to bring in the whole computer or if bringing in part of it is sufficient. If the DVD drive can’t read disks it would be enough to bring in that drive and not the whole computer.
• If you can still boot you should backup all important files first, most computer technicians know their job but bad things can happen there as well.
• I would move all important files to a external hard drive so that no one at the computer store would be able to access them.This works well if you use a program like Eraser afterwards to clean the free space of the drives so that it is not likely that they can recover the deleted files.
• If you do not have an external drive create an encrypted container on one of your hard drives with True Crypt and move your important files in there. Again it is unlikely that they can break the protection of that container.
• If all things fail you could tell the store owner that you want to stay during the check which would make sure that the technician would not snoop around.

Do you know other possibilities ? Let me know about them.

Divx Repair is a tool that is very simple to use. Just unzip it to your hard drive and run it from the location that you have unzipped it to. Divx Repair does not need to be installed and does not alter your system files or registry. Double-click Divx Repair to start the program. You can add files with the button Add Files (who would have guessed that, hehe).

The button Repair files starts the automatic repair process which tries to fix bad frames automatically. Only the bad frames will be deleted not the keyframes which means that you should be able to play the movie without errors from now on.

A error report at the end of the repair displays the amount of bad intervals that have been found. If a fix was necessary a new version of the movie will be saved in the same directory as the original movie file.