I have a AMD tower PC running XP. It's just recently crashed (strange) for the 1st time in 8 years. Basically I have lost everything. When rebooted it always says System 32 missing. I then put in the back up disc I created back in 2005. It done a partial recovery as I didn't want a destructive recovery as basically that wipes everything and restores to factory set up. It has nothing on there no more but strangely if I go into the search I can find all my existing files etc. I'm stuck on one thing though. I want to find/recover iTunes but don't know how to and where to put it if I do. This is the most important to me as I don't want to lose 2009 songs from my phone. It's defaulted back to 2005 iTunes and is empty.

If anyone can help me it would be much appreciated.

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Not sure if this could help or not but last year IE stopped working after I had one of those pop ups from google I stopped 1/2 way through. When my virus protection was up before christmas I swapped to McAfee and also bought a pc clean up program from them. As you can guess it found loads of issues and it restored the link back to IE which now works. Might be worth a punt? P.s. I'm on XP too.

not a total solution but pop the HDD into another PC and see what you can recover.

Yep agree with Lee. That's the way forward.

I've recovered most things now. Want I want to know is where do I put iTunes back into which section?

Thanks for all your help so far

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iTunes is not that difficult to sort out, as long as you now have a working empty itunes and access to the old music on the computer (not phone). Since you have restored, to a much earlier time apple now think this is a new computer, as does your phone. So the only way to sync is going to be destructive, however all is not lost and the process below should be followed as a LAST resort. The process below should work, but I am not saying it will in your case, so you MAY LOSE the music anyway.

 

Locate the itunes library on the HDD (usually under my music). Within the itunes library are a number of folders, one is called "Automatically added to itunes".

Make sure itunes is closed, now move all the music from where it is now to the "Automatically added to itunes" folder.

Make sure you are online and start itunes, all your music will be imported back into itunes again.

Now Authorise your computer to your itunes account, and resync your phone music.

 

Make sure you backup your whole computer at least monthly to avoid issues like this. XP is a right pain to recover from a failed state, upgrade to 7 or 8 and its a piece of cake as long as you have a backup.

 

XP is now redundant, it drops totally from Microsoft support in April, so no more updates of any kind. Security whole will remain unpatched from then on, and your computer will become an even greater target for malware and hackers.

For future reference, NEVER use the "My" labelled folders in ANY version of Windows, if you have a problem and have to do any sort of restore they get wiped clean, create your own folders - "Documents", "Music" etc, preferably on a different HDD (not a different partition of the same drive).

 

I found "Acronis True Image" to be very useful; I have used it once or twice and restored a damaged XP install in under 5 minutes.

 

A lot of the talk about XP support ending is scare tactics from M$ trying to get people to buy Win8; as long as your firewall and security programs are up to date it shouldn't matter much if your OS has holes in it; at lets be honest ALL M$ software has more holes than a colander. Half the time the patches add new holes that are worse than the one they were trying to fix!!!

Thanks guys. I found all of iTunes and music etc. I'll be buying a seperate HDD to store all this and copy over to the PC once I do a restore.

Is the destructive restore on my PC basically starting it from scratch like new again or is there another way?

Sorry to ask as this is just out of my territory.

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With XP, if the file system isnt too badly damaged, you can force an overwrite install, that leaves all the non Windows files intact;  but you would still have to reinstall all the other programs to get them working again; you just wouldnt lose any saved files that the various programs usually store in their own folders.

 

If you intend to stick with XP, invest in or (cough)torrent(cough) a copy of Acronis and give it a try; the best way to use it is to make the image straight after you finish loading all your programs, them make new images once a month or so.

 

Just remember that if you get infected, the infection will also get saved in the image file, so if malware trashes your system, you should go back and use an older image, not the last one you made.

Tip for the op. Buy a cheap hard drive on the net. Something like 80GB is what I use. Copy programs /data/ etc you want to keep onto this hard drive and back up regularly . Remove hard drive and store safely.

Then if you get a crash , You've got the data safe, all you need to do is re install XP.

Tip for the op. Buy a cheap hard drive on the net. Something like 80GB is what I use. Copy programs /data/ etc you want to keep onto this hard drive and back up regularly . Remove hard drive and store safely.

Then if you get a crash , You've got the data safe, all you need to do is re install XP.

I learned this the hard way a number of years back - I lost three years of photos, letters etc all because the HDD head crashed and took my data with it. Programmes etc were no problem as I still had the discs but the data was lost forever.

 

Now I make the point of having separate data  and system drives  and make a point of backing up the data on a regular basis to an external drive (cloud storage would be good but my d/l and U/l speeds are abysmal atm and with 200+GB of data it would take forever).

 

Now I suggest to everyone that they run a backup to an external drive or memory stick on a regular basis

Edited 24 February, 201412 yr by kilted

i WONT BUY EXTERNAL DRIVE BOXES ANY LONGER, THEY ALL SEEM TO HAVE PROPRIETARY POWER PLUGS AND THE psuS ALL SEEM TO DIE AFTER 12-18 MONTHS, MEANING YOU HAVE TO BUY ANOTHER ONE.

Sorry, Caps Lock key stuck - WD40 now applied..

I've bought a USB powered external hard drive now (1tb)and have found lots of old files I needed in another partition. I've salvaged my iTunes also thank god. It's very stable now after doing a destructive restore. I've binned Norton too which has helped. I've heard after April that Internet Explorer will no longer be supporting XP anymore and will be at risk from threats. I'm debating on whether to install Windows 7 but I do like XP. Hmm decisions.

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If you're happy with XP, keep XP. Yes it's out of support but it's wheel proven and fairly reliable (for windows).

An easy solution is to replace IE with a proper web browser that has better protection and updates - Chrome or Firefox would do nicely. Nobody in this day and age should be using IE.

I've bought a USB powered external hard drive now (1tb)and have found lots of old files I needed in another partition. I've salvaged my iTunes also thank god. It's very stable now after doing a destructive restore. I've binned Norton too which has helped. I've heard after April that Internet Explorer will no longer be supporting XP anymore and will be at risk from threats. I'm debating on whether to install Windows 7 but I do like XP. Hmm decisions. Sent from my PID using Tapatalk

Try Avast Free. Available on either Tucows.com or download.com .Swap to Firefox. If you like XP, but would like a cleaner faster OS, try Win 7, but why choose one over the other- dual boot -that's what I do as I've got some old hardware that Win 7 has problems with . I've got a 320GB drive with 2x 80GB systems ( Win7  & XP) ,and thec rest as tempory storage. I've got another 80GB  disk I use as a back up and take out ince backed up. I loved XP when it first came out, but now I've used Win7, I've found it's the OS MS should have made first time round. Very similar ,once customised , to XP. And things like My docs are visible in both ,if you make both partitions NTFS.

I've bought a USB powered external hard drive now (1tb)and have found lots of old files I needed in another partition. I've salvaged my iTunes also thank god. It's very stable now after doing a destructive restore. I've binned Norton too which has helped. I've heard after April that Internet Explorer will no longer be supporting XP anymore and will be at risk from threats. I'm debating on whether to install Windows 7 but I do like XP. Hmm decisions. Sent from my PID using Tapatalk

A lot depends on what you are planning to do in the near future. Most software and hardware from now will not be guaranteed to work with XP so if you are planning any major buys (or have a lot of packages subject to frequent updates), you might be better upgrading.

 

Windows 7 is actually pretty good  and stable (as is Win 8.1 so long as you bypass the new tiled layout imho - thank you classic shell!). They also guarantee future support.

 

With regards to Kiscix comments regarding IE, if you stick with XP you will be stuck with an old version of IE (unless you move to FF, chrome etc) so that will be a prime route for malware etc

Edited 25 February, 201412 yr by kilted

For future reference, NEVER use the "My" labelled folders in ANY version of Windows, if you have a problem and have to do any sort of restore they get wiped clean, create your own folders - "Documents", "Music" etc, preferably on a different HDD (not a different partition of the same drive).

 

I found "Acronis True Image" to be very useful; I have used it once or twice and restored a damaged XP install in under 5 minutes.

 

A lot of the talk about XP support ending is scare tactics from M$ trying to get people to buy Win8; as long as your firewall and security programs are up to date it shouldn't matter much if your OS has holes in it; at lets be honest ALL M$ software has more holes than a colander. Half the time the patches add new holes that are worse than the one they were trying to fix!!!

 

There is no problem using the profile folders, it's what they are there for - you can set their location to be anywhere you want (including separate drives) and Windows will make more effort to preserve the profile folders than other areas which may also get wiped.  I don't know where you got the idea that Windows will always wipe profile data as I've never seen that happen intentionally, it's the other way round as people put their files into some area which ends up getting wiped.  Furthermore, the data should all be backed up anyway.

 

XP support ending is not a scare tactic and your advice on AV is very wrong as is your comment about Microsoft software having more holes than any other - the Microsoft platform is certainly the most targetted but MS's OS has less holes than other major operating systems and they're usually quicker to patch them, your statements about Microsoft are about a decade out of date.  The anti-virus should be the very last line of defence, not the first because it's generally reactive - the antivirus companies can only produce definitions to catch malware once it's out in the wild which means if you're relying on your AV then your machine is vulnerable as the AV won't be able to do anything.  Comparatively exploits are usually patched long before there's malware out there that can use it and therefore protect the system although stupid comments like 'Half the time the patches add new holes that are worse than the one they were trying to fix!!!' unfortunately mean people turn off updates and then get hit with malware.  Also XP's security model was pretty dire in the first place so relying on the AV alone is not a sound strategy plus it's being increasingly less supported by other products.

I won't really comment on the whole XP support scenario, as I approach this from a corporate IT point of view. I need to, it's part of my job.

 

But all I'd say is that I wouldn't be using XP anywhere beyond the support cut-off. Personal or business. 

 

As with many things, the advice is given - and you make your own choices, and take your chances.

I won't really comment on the whole XP support scenario, as I approach this from a corporate IT point of view. I need to, it's part of my job.

 

But all I'd say is that I wouldn't be using XP anywhere beyond the support cut-off. Personal or business. 

 

As with many things, the advice is given - and you make your own choices, and take your chances.

 

Be interesting to see how ATM machines go... Mass majority of them are still running XP!

Not outwardly facing, from a LAN/WAN point of view though. I sincerely hope!!!

I won't really comment on the whole XP support scenario, as I approach this from a corporate IT point of view. I need to, it's part of my job.

 

But all I'd say is that I wouldn't be using XP anywhere beyond the support cut-off. Personal or business. 

 

As with many things, the advice is given - and you make your own choices, and take your chances.

Likewise - assuming my work make the sensible choice of replacing the aged fleet of XP machines.

Yep correct.

 

From a business/commercial standpoint you simply can't afford the risk, from a patching/OS security point of view. I have no doubt that there are known vulnerabilities that will be exploited as soon as MS stops any patching or work on XP.

 

Plus the fact that it's likely to be running on business hardware that should have been replaced long ago.

It's surprising how many corporate business are still running XP.

It is and it isn't, depends on the strategy. Some will only change when they're forced to.

 

Even with planned hardware & software migration/upgrade, it's taken our firm over 18 months. But then there's around 15,000 machines to consider including whether to upgrade just the OS or to replace hardware at the same time as well.

 

Kept me busy with planning and strategy for a while anyway

Yeah been about 12 months for us now for similar numbers split across the globe. Same time we renewed hardware and also changed are support company. It's been fun

Edited 27 February, 201412 yr by faboka vrs