back up question

Y

yelilly

New Member
:confused: i am a newbie i would like to say hello to everyone. now for my question my son up graded our comp. to windows xp pro before doing so he backed up the entire hard drive to an external hard drive. the install wiped out all of the programs we had on our comp many we do not have access to the cd to reinstall how can we get the programs to work again after we move them back to the comp. got everything moved back but programs won't work i would appreciate any help from you more savy users out there. we are running 250 GB lacie external hd
 
if you copied absolutely everything to the external, you could potentially boot from that and the programs would work on there, but short of reobtaining all the disks the software came on, you won't be able to use the software on xp pro, it needs to be installed
 
I may be wrong, but it sounds to me like your son just copied the visible program files across to the backup drive. The problem is many programs keep extra install information in the computer's registry, and this registry would have been wiped with the upgrade, and not replaced from the backup. That would be why the programs aren't working. They are probably coming up with errors asking you to reinstall the programs, right?
 
there's no way to... the programs have ties to the windows I.D. and basically it will only boot on the windows that it was under. plus, the registry keys won't be found on the new hard drive. basically you'll have to find the programs or get new ones.
 
thanks guys i was afraid of that oh well that is how you learn (unfortunately)a mistake we won't make again i appreciate you taking the time to answer:( :(
 
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