windows XP won't restore; keeps saying it cannot restore

My Dell laptop suddenly couldn't find its USB ports. In trying to restore the system back to a point when the USB ports were functional, I found that the system won't restore.

 

Have you "wiped" the free space on your hard drive recently? If so, then you may have deleted your restore points. It happened to me a few months ago. I was running the program, then when it showed 100% "wiped ", a warning popped up at the icon area that I was running low on disc space. I stopped right then. I checked my disc space, it packed it to where I had 93% free space, before that I had about 82% free. Anyway, my programs were intact, but all my restore points were gone, almost two months worth of them. I don't know if you ran one of those programs, but it is one possibility.

 

catilley1092, your suggestion is well worth investigating, but if you have problems with 82% free space, your problem might lie elsewhere. If you get "low memory" error boxes, also look at RAM. RAM and disk space can be "the same thing" as far as Windows is concerned. You might be squeezing data into a small space on your Hard Disk Drive only because you have overloaded your RAM. 82% free should be fine (err...great!).

rdavid, if you can't get System Restore working, try rolling back the drivers for the Universal Serial Bus Controllers in Device Manager. You could uninstall all the USB controller drivers, they should reinstall automatically, if not, find updated drivers at the system (motherboard) manufacturer's website. They are usually bundled with the chipset drivers.

I can't help you much with System Restore. If it does not work, it says to me that the system has changed significantly and it cannot run.

Matt

 

Mattman, what I did was wiped the free space of my drive to overwrite old information, and I let the program run too far. That's what happened in my case, and my laptop ran fine afterwards. I just deleted all of my restore points. Also, I thought the program (Ccleaner) would know when to stop.

 

Thanks for the extra info catilley1092. Some programs like that can be very powerful if you are not sure of it's intent.