System Restore which is a good feature in Windows to revert our system to some earlier better state when the system was working fine, shows up many problems. Some of them have been discussed already.

One of our readers was facing the problem that his System Restore has been disabled may be due to some Virus activity or due to some changes made by software.

Here are the steps to solve this problem and enable the System Restore again.

1.    Go to System Properties -> System Restore tab and uncheck the box reading “Turn off System Restore on all drives” (if checked).

2.    Another method to enable and disable the Windows XP’s System Restore feature is to use the registry. Type regedit.exe in the Run box.

3.    Navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore and verify that the key on right DisableSR has a value of 0.

4.    If the key is not there then create one DWORD value with the same name DisableSR and give it a value 0 to enable else 1 to disable.

Alternate Method:

1.    Go to the Group Policy Editor by typing gpedit.msc in the Run box

2.    Navigate to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> System Restore

3.    Set the following entries to Not Configured

Turn off System Restore
Turn off Configuration

The System Restore feature will be enabled.