Reinstalling/Restoring Windows

[El Greco]

Recently I faced some problems with Windows after a sudden power down. All printers (either USB or LPT) stopped working (the hardware was fine, I just couldn't print from Windows). I removed the printers and tried to reinstall but installation wouldn't finish, for various reasons depending on the printer. I restored Windows to a point before the accident, no solution. I reinstalled Windows with the "upgrade" option. The problem remained. Finally, I deleted all the contents of the Windows/system32/spool directory. After a reboot, all printers were found, the drivers were copied to the above directory and everything worked like a charm again. So my question is this:

WTF happens when I restore Windows or even when I reinstall it ? This was clearly a driver problem, but neither restore not reinstallation were able to fix it. One would expect that a new installation or a restore would resolve any corrupted driver problems.

[grmcdorman]

Not necessarily. Drivers that aren't supplied by the install - which is typical for printers - would not be refreshed on a new install, and possibly not by a restore. (The latter case depends on what Windows saves in its restore points; personally I don't know the details of that. It may be that restore points are only what is known to have changed, and your problem was file corruption - which wouldn't be marked as a "change".)

You should also probably do a disk scan - right click on the drive in Windows Explorer (usually C:) and select Properties; then from the window that comes up select Tools and click on Check Now under error checking.

[El Greco]

You should also probably do a disk scan - right click on the drive in Windows Explorer (usually C:) and select Properties; then from the window that comes up select Tools and click on Check Now under error checking.

Yes, I did that as well with no result. As well as a load of other things before I got the idea of deleting the folder.

BTW, I have two printers; one of them uses drivers supplied by Windows, the other uses drivers supplied by the manufacturer. Neither was fixed by reinstallation or restore. Now that I'm thinking of it again, I wonder whether it was a driver issue at all, since it looks improbable that both drivers were corrupted at the same time. Probably there was a corrupted file in the Windows printing-related files.

[Bell]

Why do you even WANT to use Windows? :boxedin:

[Rat]

Why do you even WANT to use Windows? :boxedin:

I can't speak for El Greco, but, for myself, it does the things that I want my PC to do better than any other OS that I've tried. I can't think of a better reason to use a specific OS.

[Lensman]

Why do you even WANT to use Windows? :boxedin:

Because MACs are too expensive & I don't know Linux.

[alfaniner]

Oddly enough, I just had my printer stop working through its wireless connection. I ended up having to delete the printer and reinstall it (and the software to go with it).