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I have been dealing with a complete system rebuild thanks to a Xonar DX install (which still does not work) and along the way I made several "restore points" in case of major install failure issues. Let's just say that none of them worked at all. I remember this "feature" never working before on other issues and well I am completely convinced now that this does not work. I made restore points every step of the way from first install of driver to fresh installs and none of them have don't anything to get my system working again.

Now that I am rebuilding my machine again I'm just going to turn this feature off since it's clear it does not work. So surprise me people has this ever worked for anyone and brought a non booting Win7 machine back to life? Thanks all.

Actually, I don't know if I've ever had it fail me. I have however only used it a few times though.

By the way, don't use the ASUS drivers.

http://maxedtech.com/asus-xonar-unified-drivers/

Thankfully, knock on wood, I have had windows 7 restore work for me when I needed in a bind.

I've used it a few times and it always worked perfectly.

It relies on the registry and if you actually use your PC in an experimental way to try stuff out (lots of legacy software installers and non-WHQL drivers, for example) you may be stuffed.

I've also found that it's useless if there's registry damage caused by Virus/Malware, or if you're an excessive user of PC cleanup/speedup/optimisation tools.

Occasionally it works, but on my own machines I turn it off. It slows down your machine by taking copies of things during install and it uses disk space on SSD's which isn't yet a commodity.

Occasionally it has worked (not enough to call reliable however and still is unreliable in 8/8.1). Time Machine on OS X however has never failed me, even on a hackintosh.

Generally I find that in cases of serious OS damage or corruption it's not so useful, but usually it works wonders for bad driver installs and viruses.

Well this is a head scratcher. Seems like my issue is whenever I install a sound card my box dies on boot at classpnp.sys. This happens when I use the onboard sound (Realtek 898), Creative X-Fi PCI or the Xonar DX PCIe. I have reinstalled my OS more times than I want to count over this weekend. Reading up it points to a hardware issue but I don't believe that. Right now I'm on a fresh install of Win7 and it's solid however once I install one of the above soundcards I get the failure to boot on the classpnp.sys. It does not matter if I remove the card and uninstall the drivers.

This is driving me NUTS and I cannot figure what has happened. This machine has been rock solid for over 3 years and each year I do a fresh install to remove cruft. This all started with than damn Xonar card.

Anyone have any suggestions? Should I start a new thread or continue in here, thanks all.

Have you tried clearing your CMOS?

Sounds like it could be an issue with the hard drive. Anything to do with these types of files it's a good idea to run a check disk and do a full scan. If you can't get it to boot (even in safe mode) you should be able to boot from the Windows media (or download the Windows AIK and create a Windows PE image) and run a checkdisk. If you can boot it's a good idea to run a command "sfc /scannow." It does an integrity check on core windows files (like classpnp.sys) and repairs them if it detects corruption.

To add my anecdotal evidence to restore points I've never had much luck with them. Windows 7 has a fantastic backup utility that you can use to do bare-metal backups (you can even recover to dissimilar hardware if you can't get an exact replacement). Put in an external hard drive and schedule them to run nightly. It will do full data dedupe and you should be able to get months if not years worth of backup history on a drive that's 1.5 to 2 times larger than your total data footprint. Good backups, for the most part, are much better than restore points.

just brew it! wrote:

Have you tried clearing your CMOS?

Yes, even flashed the BIOS to the current version

LaChupacabra wrote:

Sounds like it could be an issue with the hard drive. Anything to do with these types of files it's a good idea to run a check disk and do a full scan. If you can't get it to boot (even in safe mode) you should be able to boot from the Windows media (or download the Windows AIK and create a Windows PE image) and run a checkdisk. If you can boot it's a good idea to run a command "sfc /scannow." It does an integrity check on core windows files (like classpnp.sys) and repairs them if it detects corruption.

To add my anecdotal evidence to restore points I've never had much luck with them. Windows 7 has a fantastic backup utility that you can use to do bare-metal backups (you can even recover to dissimilar hardware if you can't get an exact replacement). Put in an external hard drive and schedule them to run nightly. It will do full data dedupe and you should be able to get months if not years worth of backup history on a drive that's 1.5 to 2 times larger than your total data footprint. Good backups, for the most part, are much better than restore points.

See that's the thing, it points to a broken boot disk. I have SSD as my primary boot disk and again it has never had any issues. I thought maybe there is a busted boot sector or something but again my system is completely stable (I'm using it right now). However if I try to install a sound card (tested video cards and a couple of RAID cards to make sure the PCIe slots are fine, no issues) then I get the classpnp.sys no boot issue.

Agree completely with the Win7 backup tool but I had not chance to use it prior to this disaster. Even with all the clean installs trying to get audio to work on my system I never had the system restore to work and this is why I decided to start this subject. It's so frustrating because I know my tech and yet this is so bizarre and unexplainable its driving me crazy.

Thanks for the replies people.

d0g_p00p wrote:

See that's the thing, it points to a broken boot disk. I have SSD as my primary boot disk and again it has never had any issues. I thought maybe there is a busted boot sector or something but again my system is completely stable (I'm using it right now). However if I try to install a sound card (tested video cards and a couple of RAID cards to make sure the PCIe slots are fine, no issues) then I get the classpnp.sys no boot issue.

classpnp.sys is used for storage system tasks (like priority scheduling). Based on the name I would guess it also handles things like plug and play. It's probably not a coincidence that adding a new device (even if it's pci) to your system is occurring at the same time you're unable to boot because of this system file. It'd be a good idea to check the PCI and SATA settings in your BIOS to make sure everything is running in the correct mode (like AHCI for SATA, no weird PCI settings checking for bootable devices, etc). If your computer is looking for some kind of system information on your sound card it might cause the whole boot process to stop while it's waiting for the device to return information that it won't be able to supply.

I've used System Restore a few times, this was on a laptop (W7 Pro SP1) when an update gets botched and it would get stuck at the "Preparing to Update Windows" screen on bootup. Most of the time, the cause was running out of batteries, or losing WiFi during update process.

LaChupacabra wrote:

d0g_p00p wrote:

See that's the thing, it points to a broken boot disk. I have SSD as my primary boot disk and again it has never had any issues. I thought maybe there is a busted boot sector or something but again my system is completely stable (I'm using it right now). However if I try to install a sound card (tested video cards and a couple of RAID cards to make sure the PCIe slots are fine, no issues) then I get the classpnp.sys no boot issue.

classpnp.sys is used for storage system tasks (like priority scheduling). Based on the name I would guess it also handles things like plug and play. It's probably not a coincidence that adding a new device (even if it's pci) to your system is occurring at the same time you're unable to boot because of this system file. It'd be a good idea to check the PCI and SATA settings in your BIOS to make sure everything is running in the correct mode (like AHCI for SATA, no weird PCI settings checking for bootable devices, etc). If your computer is looking for some kind of system information on your sound card it might cause the whole boot process to stop while it's waiting for the device to return information that it won't be able to supply.

This is the thing, yes everything I have been reading about classpnp.sys points to disks. I have checked all possible BIOS options and pulled all the disks out except my boot disk which comes up with no errors at all using various utilities. I swear this all started with that Xonar card and now have seemed to permanently haunt my system. I did get the onboard sound working last night and it was going smooth for about a hour then the audio started cracking and popping forcing me to reboot and well I think you can guess what had happened when my system tried to start back up.

Like i said I have never seen anything like this. Right now i have a new SSD coming in to rule that out and if that still does not work then I guess I'll look into a replacement mobo which I am really dreading. Again thanks all for your help and suggestions