Is it possible to enable System Protection from the command prompt?

Solution 1:

Looking at a an article for Windows 7 about the same issue, I found a suggestion to use the following command:

Rstrui.exe /offline:C:\windows=active

Rstrui.exe opens up the system restore window. I'm not sure what the argument means, but it made it so I could actually use the restore points! Yay!

Unfortunately, this did not completely fix my problem - the system restore failed. The error message implied that it had something to do with the registry. So, using the command prompt I went into C:\Windows\System32\config and renamed two of the registry files:

ren SYSTEM system.001
ren SOFTWARE software.001

After doing this, I ran the system restore again (using the same argument as I did the first time) and it worked! I was able to log back into my computer!