This is where System Restore comes in handy. As most of us know, it’s where we can roll back system settings to a predetermined point. It was available on XP and Vista, and you’ll also find it on Windows 7.

But now lets assume that for some reason Windows 7 won’t allow us to boot into Windows or run system restore in the usual way. What do we do now? Well, you can run system restore from your Windows 7 disk. Before you do this, make sure you have exhausted all other options first. One wrong move when running system restore from your Windows disk, and you could find yourself reformatting your drive – and that’s not what we want to do.

So begin by inserting your Windows 7 disk, and boot up your computer. We’ll assume that you already have your BIOS set up boot from CD first. If not you’ll have to enter the BIOS (usually by pressing F2 or DEL at start-up), and change the boot up priorities.

You should see a prompt to boot from DVD, and after you press any key the Windows 7 setup will begin. At this stage, no changes are being made to your computer so don’t worry, you’ll be given options later to choose what you want to do. The first screen you’ll see is where you’re prompted to choose your language and keyboard layouts. Again, we’re not changing anything on your Windows installation at this stage, we’re only choosing this for the benefit of the setup program, so go ahead and choose your keyboard layout and click next.

The next screen is the one we need to be careful about. We don’t want to click “Install Now”, because that will start a new installation of Windows 7. We want to click on the link further down that says, “Repair your computer”.

Clicking on this will prompt the computer to search for installed operating systems. It will find our Windows 7 install, and you’ll be taken through a wizard. Click next, and choose “System Restore” from the menu. What you see now should be the same kind of dialogue boxes as you’d see if you ran system restore from your Windows desktop, except in this case, we haven’t booted into Windows so no nasty viruses or bugs can stop us from carrying out the maintenance. Follow the instructions to choose a system restore point from a day you know your computer was working correctly, and when you reboot you should hopefully find you have a working system again. If not, repeat these instructions and maybe choose a restore point that was further back in time.

Windows 7 users can for instance access the feature by right-clicking on a file in Windows Explorer and selecting the Restore Previous Versions context menu entry.

The feature is turned on in all editions of Vista and Windows 7 by default.

Shadow Explorer is a third party tool that offers the following feature set:

• Show available point-in-time copies
• Browse through Shadow Copies
• Retrieve versions of files and folders

The hard drive partition, date and time are selectable at the top of the application. Shadow Explorer displays recoverable files grouped into their folders on the left side.

Both files and folders can be exported with a right-click and the selection of export from the menu.

The main advantage of Shadow Copy is the interface which is easier to navigate and use, especially if multiple files or folders need to be recovered on the system.

A lot has changed since our first review in 2008. Shadow Copy for instance does not need elevated privileges anymore to run. The latest version is now showing all modified, accessed and created timestamps as well which are preserved when files or folders are exported.

Shadow Explorer is available for download from the developer website. It is available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.

This means that you can’t see the file anymore in Windows while it still exists on your hard drive. File Recovery tools are able to restore those files if no other file has overwritten parts of the deleted one.

Handy Recovery works on every Windows edition including Windows Vista and supports recovery from FAT12/16/32, EFS, NTFS/NTFS 5(including encrypted or compressed ones) and from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards.

While tools like Recuva only show a list of files found Handy Recovery displays the complete folder structure including the deleted files. This makes it much easier to locate files that you want to restore. It also displays a probability rating that shows how likely it is that the file can be restored.

It is furthermore possible to scan a drive for files or filetypes. You could use the filter option to search the drive for all deleted mp3 files and select those that you want to restore again.

If the scan of the hard drive did not reveal a file that you want to restore you still have the chance to restore it by using the Extended Analysis option.

If you have analyzed the disk where your deleted files were located (either an existing logical drive or a lost partition) and still cannot find your files in the folder where they were stored, this may be because the corresponding file records have been overwritten. In this case it is impossible to recover file path and name, however there is still a chance that the content of the file is still saved on the disk and has not been overwritten at least partially.

Handy Recovery has two more options that stick our from the rest of the competition. The first is the ability to search for lost partitions and restore files that have been stored on those partitions. The tool either scans a hard drive automatically for lost partitions or lets you choose a range that should be scanned. If a partition has been found it will be added to the list of hard drives.

A unique feature as far as I know is the option to save disk images. This option creates an exact image of a logical drive which means all files and deleted files will be saved in that image. I suppose this is how experts and the police are analyzing the contents of the hard drive.

This way the original partition will be left untouched while it is still possible to recover files from the image.

The mentioned advanced features are only available in the retail version of Handy Recovery (which offers a 30-day trial period) while the others can also be used in the freeware version of it. You can download both from the developers homepage.

Running Restoration might give you a shock at first use, more than 11000 files were listed on my C: drive that could be restored. That´s a lot of information: I advise everyone to use a file shredder like Eraser for sensitive files and folders. Taking a look at all the 11000 files searching for the files that I would like to restore would take a lot of time, Restoration therefor offers some methods to narrow down the results.

You can sort the results by name, original folder, size and date modified which helps a lot if you know the name of the file or the folder it was in. Restoration also offers the option to enter a partial file name or extension and display only those. This is actually the best option to reduce the amount of files that are displayed. If you are searching for a text document you could make Restoration display all .txt files.

Restoration does not install itself on your system, uninstall and run it from the location that you uninstalled it into. The size is only a little bit more than 400k.