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missing user profile file registry

B

Burnsy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 1, 2001
Messages
440
i have a friend that is running windows xp mce. her laptop freezes every once in a while and she has to manually reboot it. tonight when it rebooted the computer started back up and the desktop looked as if it just came out of the box. her folders on her desktop, music, pictures all gone.

upon another restart a box popped up before the long-on screen giving a message something along the lines of

windows can not locate the registry that goes along with your user profile, so we are going to put you in a temporary user name

all her files are still there you just have to search for them

is there anyway to make it so her computer can locate the registry or should i just make a new user profile?

if this doesnt make much sense im sorry.
 
Her profile is probably corrupt. If you look at

c:\Documents and Settings\

You will see her original profile, and probably another profile with the same name but .000 tacked onto the end of it.

The .000 profile is the new profile.

All her data will still be under the original profile.

There are a couple of ways to fix this. Some just start using the .000 profile and migrate their data to it. That's ok in a pinch, but I prefer not to use .000 profiles so here's what I do:

  1. We will assume the original profile name was "PCUSER"
  2. Rename the PCUSER profile folder to PCUSER(BAD)
  3. In the management console, create a new profile called 123456. Set the password the same. Give it admin privilages.
  4. Reboot and log into the 123456 profile.
  5. In the management console, delete the old PCUSER account.
  6. In the management console, create a new profile called PCUSER (the original name). Yes, this is the same as the one you just deleted, but it has to be done due to the way SIDS work in windows.
  7. Set privilages as needed (admin). It will default to user which is useless in XP.
  8. Set the password for the new profile.
  9. Restart the machine, and log into the new profile.
  10. In c:\documents and settings, you should now see a new PCUSER profile folder.
  11. Migrate the data from the PCUSER(OLD) profile to the newly created PCUSER profile. Do NOT copy the folders. Copy the contents of the folders. Trying to copy the folders themselves gets goofy sometimes.
  12. This should include the My Documents, Desktop and Favorites folders. I would not migrate the rest unless you really know what you are doing.
  13. In the management console, delete the temporary 123456 profile you created.

You'll have to reset the prefs in certain apps most likely. You can migrate certain apps settings from the old profile as well, but this gets tricky and it's usually better to just re-set the prefs in the apps, which usually isn't that hard.

A couple of notes:

  • For the new PCUSER profile to have access to the PCUSER(OLD) profile, you will need to set the new PCUSER profile to have admin privilages.
  • Creating a new PCUSER account will NOT automatically re-link it to the old PCUSER profile folder due to the Security ID (SID) and the windows uses them. That's why all the re-naming and re-creation has to be done.
 
thanks for the help.

quick question. what is the reason why this happened?
 
Sorry, but you'll never really know unless something jumps out, like a bad HD or RAM module or something.
 
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