Hello Bob, Tuesday, March 30, 2010, 6:27:28 PM, you wrote: bjc> I have lost a file. I tryed system restore with several restore bjc> points that I have. It always comes back with this message. bjc> "system restor did not complete successfully do to an error" First of all your System Restore is hosed so that needs dealing with but it will not restore files unless you've added that functionality to it. By default it only does system files not user data files. One of those occasions when a backup proves it's more than worth the effort to keep up with - but you won't be the last to find this out the hard way .... nor the last unfortunately <sigh> Anyway, lecturing apart you might be able to recover your file as Woody suggest by searching for it without specifying the extension type. To do this, and assuming the file name is filename ( change this for whatever the lost file was actually called ) then search for filename.* The '*' at the end is a wild card that means any extension at all and should find .bak / .tmp etc... one of which may be the file you lost or a previous version of it at least. As for System Restore, the only way to sort this out is to turn it off and then back on again. This deleted all current restore points but they aren't any use to you now anyway and being hosed means it isn't saving any more in a way that's useful to you, i.e. being able to roll back to them !! -- Best regards, Barry mailto:[email protected] MicroSoft Free Zone running Ubuntu 9.10'Karmic'