No memory after restoring C drive

I was having some problems with my C partition, nothing serious, but seemed to be getting worse. When a message said the KERNEL32.dll was missing I suddenly realized I could restore the last image of the C drive, which was a full one.
This was my first try and everything seemed to go well. I only was in doubt about step 5.7 "Selecting restored partiton size." I really didn't understand what it meant. I had used about 6G on the 20G hard drive.I decided to use the default (which always seems to be the correct one anyway) and again everything seemed to go fine. THEN WHEN I WENT TO USE THE COMPUTER DISASTER STRUCK! After just a couple minutes I would get the message "Out of Memory" and I would do a reboot, use Ctl,ALT, Del, to close down everything to get a little more memory to try to check things out. I looked at the C drive and everything looked like it always did. Finally the next day I gave up and reformatted the Hard Drive (C partition only) and reinstalled Windows. I had reformatted about 4 years ago and had no problem at all. This time files were missing I had trouble getting the display to change to 600x800. My screen was terrible and several programs wouldn't load because of it. Finally found a fix by downloading DELL\drivers\97JDG. There were several other problems too which I finally fixed. Took me a couple days easy.

Anyway all this background is so I can ask "Does anyone have any idea what happened?" I can't try it again and have to go through all that again if things go wrong. I thought maybe the memory was going bad but I ran a diagnostic check on DELL and it said it was fine. I have Norton Virus checker and Firewall running which I keep updated. Norton said everything was fine. If I can't find out what I did wrong I'll just have to forget about using TI and hope for the best. Thanks for reading all this. I know it was long. Connie

 

Hello Connie,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please clarify when exactly you got the error message and what exactly was written on it? Were you able to boot into Windows after you restored the image? Did you get the problems with the screen after you reinstalled Windows from scratch or after you restored the image?

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hi Connie,

To me it sounds like you created another partition on your drive and restored the image onto that. That might explain why you were getting messages saying you were running low on memory. Windows could not create the virtual memory it needed on the hard drive because all of the free space was taken up by the second partition. Not knowing more about your hardware, etc., that's all I can think of. I'm assuming you have only one hard drive and it has only one partition. Next time you restore an image, make sure you let TI delete the existing partition (the one you want to restore). I haven't done a restore in a while so I forget the exact procedure.

As for the missing KERNELL32.dll, most of the times I see that happening when the hard drive has errors on it. Booting into Safe Mode and running Scandisk (set to automatically fix errors) sometimes fixes this problem. Otherwise a reinstall is in order.

You might want to go to Dell's site and download all the drivers for your hardware and put them onto a CD. That way you'll have them in case you need to do another reinstall. Did your system come w/ a system recovery disk? That usually has the OS and drivers for your system so it saves you from having to manually install each driver. Be careful, though, because these recovery disks usually wipe the whole drive first so be sure to back-up your data.

Now's the best time to image your system, by the way.

Hope this helps,

Joe

 

Joe, thanks for responding - sorry I didn't answer before now and hope you even see this. Your answer gave me something to think about and now I think I know what I did wrong to cause all my problems. We have had a family emergency and the computer is the least of my worries for now. It will be about a week before things get back to normal. Thanks again. Connie

 

Sorry to hear about the family emergency. When you have time get back to us with what went wrong. We all learn when people take the time to explain what caused a problem and what the solution was.