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CCleaner not showing system restore points


Bradforth

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I am begining to think (as I suspect you are too) that this is something that is happening as a result of something particular to your machine, some setting, some entry, something obscure.

 

I say that because we have done almost everything apart from physically take your machine to bits!!

 

I think you are now fully qualified as an xp tech:)

 

Seriously I suspect you can cope with things as they are, you obviously know your way around the machine.

 

One day you may just have a Eureks moment about it.

i'm wondering if it's some registry entry that's gone walkabout. In fairness this installation is old. however i'm not of the reinstall and start again school. apart from which, it's not that straightforward now with xp, and this in fairness is a pretty complex machine .. dual boot xp/linux on separate bootable discs.  it would take weeks to put back the XP system to how it is at the moment. oddly though as i keep pointing out, the problem has arisen since the last time i did a cleanup and backup. my habit is to reduce the number of restore points (given all is stable and they're not needed), clear the hibernation file, clean the temp files and junk and tidy the registry (usually there isn't much) i examine and judge what is reported. then i defrag then back up. I use CCleaner for much of this. I only noticed this issue the other day. Some things do auto update, firefox, google chrome, and the virus checker (f-secure safe). I'm going to un/re-install the latter (anti-virus) as a last ditch attempt. I have disabled it, but that wouldn't necessarily defeat the system level drivers. also i'll have a look at and see what is going on at startup time using sysinternals' autoruns. i'll likely notice anything different. i haven't noticed any new process popping up in task manager. At the moment the system is pretty stable, and i don't get many errors apart from the odd application exception now and again.

 

The offer of the procmon dump was genuine, and hence my question about how does CCleaner look for the restore files. running in debug mode doesn't log anything significant. the procmon trace could be useful to the programmers. i'll see how it goes after dinner. sustenance calls, and its voice is more prevalent than minor computer configurations at the moment :-)

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This is a user forum only, the devs will likely look at it if you post it but unless they need more information on a bug they won't comment. Sadly none of us, probably, can tell the answer to your "how does it work..." question

 

ADVICE FOR USING CCleaner'S REGISTRY INTEGRITY SECTION

DON'T JUST CLEAN EVERYTHING THAT'S CHECKED OFF.

Do your Registry Cleaning in small bits (at the very least Check-mark by Check-mark)

ALWAYS BACKUP THE ENTRY, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'LL BREAK IF YOU DON'T.

Support at https://support.ccleaner.com/s/?language=en_US

Pro users file a PRIORITY SUPPORT via email support@ccleaner.com

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@bartholomewking

have you ever ran the registry cleaner process in CC?

I ask because a couple of years ago, when I used to run registry cleans periodically, some time later, I had strange things happen with my System Volume Information folder, which I could only pin down to a corrupt registry.

the thing with reg cleaners is they do the job at the time but any ill-effects can take ages to be noticed.

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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thank you mta,

 

the answer is yes, generally when something has been removed (uninstalled) to find and remove the often left behind debris if necessary. Sadly many uninstallers aren't very well written or at least leave behind reg entries, files and folders. Interestingly the CCleaner one (uninstaller) seems pretty good and didn't as far as I could see leave any reg entries behind. Hence when i uninstalled it, i checked the registry to see if anything had been left behind so that a new 'clean' install would occur. It did not appear to have left anything behind, but one can never be sure.

 

I agree about registry cleaners they can be dangerous. The CCleaner one is fairly gentle however and more importantly gives you the opportunity to ignore things. Usually it just pulls up junk entries. It's particularly useful when something has done an update say, or a program has been removed. I try to make informed judgements as to what to remove and what to leave behind (CCleaner has an ignore list). Also of course there is an immense debate about the overall value of such things in the first place. my predjudice would be, use with care, not routinely and with your eyes open. Contrarywise, if you don't maintain things, then over a period of time a lot of junk is accumulated. this can also cause problems.

 

I do use another also, but I would be careful about cleaning out everything that they recommend. The other product I use for this purpose originates in your continent and again gives control and the ability to choose for yourself what to remove :-)

 

Avoid like the plague so called "one click maintenance"  I suggest!!!

 

My intuition at the moment tells me that some absence from the registry could well be the root cause of this problem. Oddly, I haven't done much in the way of configuration/installation this month, and the problem has only recently manifested. Things that i am aware have updated are firefox, google chrome, adobe flash, java, f-secure safe (anti-virus), all pretty unavoidable with the possible exception of java.

 

As a final shot, as i suggested i would to Hazelnut, i uninstalled the virus checker and tried CCleaner again. Same result sadly.

 

It's obviously not a CCleaner version issue, as I have tried different versions going back to the version suggested earlier by Trium, and they all exhibit the same behaviour. I will stress, this change in behaviour is recent ( last couple of weeks) and doesn't map to an update date of CCleaner.

 

If i become sufficiently OCD over this i'll burrow more into Procmon traces and maybe a debug, however, life is a bit short, and as i say, there don't appear to be any other apparent problems. I like the look of the tweaking.com stuff as well ( it also looks like it has potential for both good and evil but it logs what it does). if i do anything too contentious, i'll do an image backup of the system drive first.

 

things i have learned in this exercise ...

 

Always use a system log document. ( i started mine 18 months ago )

Few things are too trivial to put in it.

Record everything in it if you want to keep things running smoothly and understandably.

This includes mealtimes, recipes and toilet breaks.

 

incidently to MTA, i like your slogan at the bottom of your post, but i slightly disagree, it's a little optimistic.

My own version would be: "Two things are certain Death and Loss of Data" you have no control over either

 

;-) Cheers!

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Hi, bartholomewking.  

 

As a diehard XPer I find this problem intriguing.  

If you are still interested when next you emerge from Wonderland, consider these points.   :lol:

 

My first intuition leans toward an antivirus related issue.  

I don't use f-secure safe so can not help directly, but... 

- Did f-secure update at the time when the issue started?  

- Have you tried checking with their support to ask about the issue?  

 

Have you tried to go back to a restore point before this issue started?  

- If you have around 20 of them, there should be one from more than 2, 3 weeks ago.  

- It is easy to reset (undo the restoration) if it doesn't help.   

 

If you solve this thing, by all means post back what worked.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The CCleaner SLIM version is always released a bit after any new version; when it is it will be HERE :-)

Pssssst: ... It isn't really a cloud. Its a bunch of big, giant servers.

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Hello login123,

 

Good to meet another dedicated XP user. I have my reasons for sticking with it ( on this machine ), and i'll perhaps explain to some of our younger listeners one day, but now is not the time .... there will be time to wander off into the 32 bit sunset but it hasn't arrived quite yet.

 

I did wonder about the virus checker. As i pointed out earlier i use f-secure, i use it because Microsoft Security Essentials is probably fairly useless these days on XP and cannot be realistically updated. Also I had a very bad experience with one product that I had been using for some years. It updated itself and made the machine unbootable. It was almost impossible to uninstall but i managed with a very large side dish of luck and a following wind.  Fortunately a religious backup regime saved me there. i also use win-patrol. the latter mostly to stop annoying programs inserting stuff into the registry run (startup) entries ( you know who i'm talking about ... don't you Spotify?). Winpatrol is a useful program, and hasn't previously interfered with CCleaner.

 

I did uninstall f-secure, I did uninstall winpatrol and then tried re-installing ccleaner to no avail.

 

To be truthful, this problem is a minor irritation, however it could be an indication of something more profound, hence i too am interested in why.

 

I'm not overly keen to do a system restore going a long way back for a couple of reasons, one of which is it buggers up my indexers and email and a number of other things. I know that it is reversible, but a restore point is not a backup, and a full image takes about 4 hours to create, and similar to restore. The experiment i did mention in an earlier post was to create a system restore, reboot the machine immediately into Safe Mode and restore it. It was simply to prove that system restore was working. the timespan before the change was so short that most of the normally affected applications didn't notice.

 

To all intents and purposes this is a production machine, so i don’t like to interfere with it too much.

 

I would ask you a favour, do you know of a forum where the last vestiges of the elderly congregate to talk over the disaster of april 2014 and also understand XP internals. I have another problem that drives me crazy. It may be insoluble, but it’s not a Piriform issue, so here is probably not the place for it.

 

Cheers!

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I thought maybe this was not your first experience with xp.   :D

 

No, I can't recommend a particular forum, just don't know.  

Google finds quite a few, but i have almost no first hand experience with them.

 


There are quite a few xp users on this forum, maybe they will chime in.

 

 

 



 

 

 

The CCleaner SLIM version is always released a bit after any new version; when it is it will be HERE :-)

Pssssst: ... It isn't really a cloud. Its a bunch of big, giant servers.

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feel free @bartholomewking to start a XP discussion in The Lounge thread, or even Software maybe.

not just Piriform subjects are allowed, whatever grabs your fancy is open for discussion, and as @login123 stats, there are quiet a few (for some strange reasons :P ) XP users still out there - and on this forum!.

 

and as you say about this problem of yours, it is trivial but I agree with your logic, although nice to find a resolution, it's more important to find the cause, as that way you'll be able to prevent it happening again.

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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Thank you both login123 and mta for your suggestions. My strange reason for keeping XP is fairly simple, the machine is old, and it's not really possible to get drivers for some of the essential devices on it. I have had it running with Vista, but came to the conclusion the amount of work involved to get it on a par with how it is working now probably wasn't worth it, particularly as Vista is not terribly well supported, and is likely to go the way of all flesh fairly soon. Ironically, i can run windows 7, 8.1, and even at a push 10 running under a virtual machine under Linux 64bit. Unfortunately perfomance is prohibitive, and a lot of the stuff i do is realtime ( audio/video ). I can even boot the same Linux system from within XP and run it from within a virtual machine. 

 

In the fullness of time, I will simply retire it from the internet and leave it in a stable state. Hardware isn't a problem given the wonders of ebay. function and data is all!

 

The whole upgrade the hardware and software cycle till the thing grinds to a halt is familiar to me. I'm long enough in the tooth to have worked in the days of card readers, teletypes and paper tape.

 

The whole thing reminds me of a song from 1957 by the wonderful Flanders and Swann - "a song of repoduction"

 

"i had a little grammophone, i wound it round and round, and with a sharpish needle it made a cheerful sound.

And then they amplified it .. it was much louder then. so we sharpened fibre needles, to make it soft again"

 

Perhaps the lounge it is.

Hopefully they have bath chairs in there.

bon soir

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I wonder if System Restore itself has corruption in it, such as a bad restore point that's causing CCleaner the issue.

 

And I also wonder what would happen if turning off System Restore, and then immediately enabling it again would allow CCleaner to again show the restore points. Here's the Microsoft instructions on how to turn it off, and turn it back on:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/310405

 

Note that turning it off will purge all restore points.

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I wonder if System Restore itself has corruption in it, such as a bad restore point that's causing CCleaner the issue.

 

And I also wonder what would happen if turning off System Restore, and then immediately enabling it again would allow CCleaner to again show the restore points. Here's the Microsoft instructions on how to turn it off, and turn it back on:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/310405

 

Note that turning it off will purge all restore points.

SUCCESS!!!! SOLVED

 

Thank you very kindly Andavari.

Your suggestion worked.

 

The procedure I used was as follows:

 

1) Turn off system restore as described in the above article indicated by Andavari

http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/310405

 

2) Wait a few seconds while the machine clears the restore points (mouse pointer goes busy)

 

3) Restart

 

4) Turn System Restore Monitoring back on.

 

4) Check for restore points using Accessories->System Tools->System Restore ( partly to prolong the sense of anticipation )

 

5) One system checkpoint was indicated by System Restore Dialogue at this stage.

 

6) Run CCleaner .... and there it was also. To re-iterate, before this no restore points were shown in CCleaner (i.e. the results pane was blank)

 

7) Create another restore point using the System Restore Dialogue.

 

8) Check again with CCleaner, this was also shown

 

Marvellous, thank you very much.

 

It does beg the question, how to check restore point integrity. chkdsk /f wasn't reporting any errors.

I'll have a look into that and see if I turn up anything.

In the interim, thank you once again.

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Way to go Andavari.    

 

Edit:  See, we old xp'ers still have some savvy.  (well, Andavari does, at least.)   :lol:

 

I too am waiting for the XP question, wherever you post it.  

The CCleaner SLIM version is always released a bit after any new version; when it is it will be HERE :-)

Pssssst: ... It isn't really a cloud. Its a bunch of big, giant servers.

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Glad it helped.

 

I knew from experience System Restore couldn't be relied upon because so many times it fails meaning it must be getting some corruption in it. All the more reason to rely upon 3rd party disk imaging software.

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would it be helpful to create a "How to fix corrupted Restore Points" right next to "Corrupted Recycle Bin" in the pinned list of topics ?

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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It's something I do as a routine when cleaning up machines (turning monitoring for sys restore off then back on), you can gain back gigs of space, especially on Vista.

 

Restore points can be corrupted by viruses etc and can be dodgy to go back to.

 

Might be an idea to do a pinned Andavari.

 

Support contact

https://support.ccleaner.com/s/contact-form?language=en_US&form=general

or

support@ccleaner.com

 

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You all raise some interesting points about  system restore. I have been trying to find something that can check them for integrity, but have drawn a blank so far.

My comment earlier in the thread the "I have no reason to suspect earlier restore points were invalid" or some such, was clearly incorrect. Chkdsk however does not find anything wrong. In my reading I did come across a site that stated that restore points were cumulative, although how they can be or what that is intended to mean I'm not sure. I'm going to have a read of 'Russinovich et al. Windows System Internals' to see if that sheds any more light on the subject.

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Might be an idea to do a pinned Andavari.

 

I would but the only reservation I have is the process the same for newer versions of Windows?

 

It would be nice if Piriform had some official documentation written up on it since it can cause CCleaner to not see any restore points.

Edited by Andavari
typos
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Yup newer version its the same AFAIK

 

ADVICE FOR USING CCleaner'S REGISTRY INTEGRITY SECTION

DON'T JUST CLEAN EVERYTHING THAT'S CHECKED OFF.

Do your Registry Cleaning in small bits (at the very least Check-mark by Check-mark)

ALWAYS BACKUP THE ENTRY, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'LL BREAK IF YOU DON'T.

Support at https://support.ccleaner.com/s/?language=en_US

Pro users file a PRIORITY SUPPORT via email support@ccleaner.com

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  • 5 months later...

I have also now experienced this problem.  OS is Windows 7 Pro and some time in the last two days CCleaner stopped listing all restore points, although they can still be listed in the System Restore facility so I know they are there.  WMI is running.  Recently updated CCleaner to version 5.16 so that makes me suspicious....

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