Sorry about my username, but it rejected so many of my attempts that I just gave up.
I have a friend, a sweet elderly lady whose main interests are her two church web sites and her email. Her Dell desktop running Windows 7 Pro x64 was a horrendous mess of malware, totally uncleanable and crashing left and right. It didn't have a valid restoration partition. So I used my official Dell Windows 7 Pro System Restore flash drive to reinstall the system. Of course it backed up her data.
When it was done the computer software was clean but it was still crashing. I fade a mistake; I tried re-re-installing from the flash drive. When that didn't help I looked at hardware, found some bad RAM, and replaced it.
Then I had a working system except the data restoration was from the second installation, i.e. nothing. I looked around for something that would restore from the original backup. Dell backup and restore wouldn't do it. I couldn't find anything.
So I made a copy of the second backup folder, and copied the files from the first backup folder into the second backup folder. Just to make sure I touched all the files to the same date and time as the second backup files. Then I re-re-reinstalled.
It restored some , but I'm pretty sure not all, of the files from the first backup. And when it boots it keeps asking to reboot to restore the data files. I bet i can stop it from doing that, but...
How can I restore the original backed up data files?