SVS Best Practices, Part 5: Restoring a Crashed PC

In Part 5 of this Best Practices for SVS series I explain how you can restore layers after your PC has crashed.

Some of the many questions I receive is from users and administrators that have to deal with crashed PC's. After restoring the PC they need data or even the complete layer for an application.

Your PC crashes! After you re-install Windows, you find a directory called fslrdr, but you are not able to retrieve the layers. You install SVS, and even though you see lots of layers, the SVS admin it is completely empty.

When there is data or special settings inside the layers, and you need this, you will not find a tool to retrieve the layer.

How can you restore data from these layers in FSLRDR?

The answer to this question depends on what you need to retrieve. If it is only data, you can easily copy it from the layer into a normal file system.

Open the folder with number 1.

Go to [_B_]PROGRAM FILES[_E_] and mostly you see what the layer contains.

In this example let's say there is a folder named Microsoft Office in it.

You now know this is the layer that belongs to Office.

The data should be in the read/write layer.

So now you have to find out which is the read/write layer, and which is the read only layer.

That can be decided easy.

In the read only layer you will not find a folder named S-1-5-21-4039969407-1211297412-2322265089-1000

Remember that the folder can have a different number than the one in this article. This number is the Security identifier that belongs to the account. The last 3 or 4 numbers mean something.
If it ends with 500 it is an administrator SID. If it ends with 1000 it is a renamed administrator account. In the above example you see that this layer has a renamed administrator.

So if you found the Office layer with the SID inside, then you can copy the wanted data to the normal file system.

In the event you need the whole layer, you should use another trick.

Install a clean Windows on your machine, but DO NOT install SVS.

Rename the folder FSLRDR. You can choose whatever you want, it just needs a different name. FSLRDR1 will work.

Then you can install SVS.

Next open all the folders with the numbers to see what the layers represent.

Do this by going to [_B_]PROGRAM FILES[_E_].

Search the read layer and the read/write layer, and copy them inside a folder with the name Office for this example.

Then start SVSadmin.

Click on file, new layer, and create a new layer with an Office installation.

Go to C:\FSLRDR.

This is a hidden file folder, so probably you first have to go to tools, and uncheck the mark hide filesystem folders.

Now the folder is visible.

See what the numbers are for the new layer you created. It is always 1 and 2 for the first application.

Rename 1 and 2 to 1.old and 2.old.

Now you can copy the two folders from the old FSLRDR directory where you have the old layers from the pc before it crashed.

After you have finished, you can use the old folder again.

This only retrieves the files. The registry from the old system is always lost.

Doing this for 50 or more applications will take you a lot of time, so generally it is easier to export your layers before you re-install a PC.

When the PC has crashed, and will not boot again, then this method will be helpful.