Help Me!!!

Discussion in 'Computer Science & Culture' started by Communist Hamster, Oct 8, 2004.

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  1. Communist Hamster Cricetulus griseus leninus Valued Senior Member

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    Ok... we disconnected the cpu from everything, then took it to the pc shop to have it upgraded. No probs. But Mr computer upgrader was on holiday, and it would have cost about 300 quid to upgrade anyway. so we took it back home. we set it up, but lo and behold, it acts as though windows xp ain't installed. so we are confused for a few minutes, then I installed windows xp. Upon getting to the login page of windows xp, it thinks there is no usernames. So I made one and got to the desktop. All my files were missing. I checked My computer, and C was in fact still 44GB full, same as before.

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    So I tried documents and settings/User. My old stuff is in there. Good. Double click on my documents

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    I can still play battlefield 1942, and obviusly I got the intenet working, but I cannot get to my old stuff. One more thing, when the computer starts up, it asks for which thing to start,
    Windows XP Home Edition
    or
    Windows XP Home Edition
    The bottom one gets a message saying that
    Windows/system32/config/system is missing or corrupted.
    I know that the bottom option is my old username and stuff, so PLEASE HELP ME FIX IT!
     
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  3. Ste_harris Net Ninja Registered Senior Member

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    Ok I know exactly how to fix this, you'll need the following items:
    1) A speed sign that doesn't end in a five or a zero
    2) A jar of fresh Marmalade (any preserve will work)
    3) A large mallet

    Okay, now that you've gathered these items put them to one side, I’ll come to them in a moment... anyway silliness aside...

    Have you tried Control Panel>User Accounts>
    Is your original login present? And more importantly is it password protected?
    If it is Click Change an account>'User'>Remove password
    Now this should allow you to access that Users files (Hopefully its that simple)

    Really XP should have formatted your HD when you reinstalled it, so i think it might have gone wrong and you ended up with it trying to do a detect and repair type thingamabob.

    What were you having upgraded? Most things are simple to upgrade stuff like sound/video cards being easiest, whereas a something like a new mobo being relatively annoying.

    Anyway post back with your progress, and any other info you can think of if my solution doesn't help
     
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  5. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    If it's anything like what happens if you alter Outlook's mail folder it will still have the data on the drive it's just the system is no longer "hooked" up correctly to understand where it is. This usually means alot of playing and fiddling to fix the problem.

    I know I mention a program not the OS but the point here is this:

    The system is asking for a folder:
    C:\Document and Settings\User\My Documents

    However your "User" was probably under its "username", for instance if your login was "Cyberbob" it would look like:
    C:\Document and Settings\Cyberbob\My Documents

    One varient of fix would be to copy the folder Cyberbob with all it's contents and move those contents to the User folder, this will give you all the contents of that name as User. (In theory)

    The only other potential is to regenerate the original account name (create the Cyberbob user again) !!!although BACKUP the Cyberbob folder before doing that!!! otherwise you might find it deletes the folder completely.
     
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  7. MagiAwen Registered Senior Member

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    Go into your old installation under safe mode. You will have to log in as the Administrator which is usually different than the owner in winxphome.

    If you had never used the administrator account (it is not an account with computer administrator priviledges, it is an account you do not see in the userlist no matter who you are logged in as) anyway if you never passworded this there will be no password for safe mode. This was m$'s way of saving you but a lot of comp places for some reason don't know about it. So obviously there are a lot of users that don't know about it. They see themselves logged in as owner and assume because it is an administrators account that that is the administrator account. Not entirely true.

    It sounds as if the profile may or may not have been deleted of your old account. If it has been deleted or messed up you may never get your files back in their original state but you can try.

    My suggestion to you is to like I said go in under safe mode as Administrator and find all your documents, back them up and completely reinstall your O/S.

    From safe mode you could try to restore but if your profile is messed up it's not going to make it any better.

    As far as the installations go, you are going to want to just get rid of both of them after you back up your stuff because this will end up giving you a hard time in the long run.
     
  8. MagiAwen Registered Senior Member

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    225
    If you try to rename or recreate the profile that originally messed up without backing up...as stryder implied...you WILL lose all your original docs. I can guarantee that

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    Also, if you go in and save old user info and are going to try to recreate the profile, DO NOT copy these over to new profile

    Ntuser.dat
    Ntuser.dat.log
    Ntuser.ini

    Whatever went wrong with the original profile will just be transferred over.
     
  9. vslayer Registered Senior Member

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    4,969
    i say, borrow a friends comp.
    network them
    copy your important stuffs onto your friends comp
    double check you got all af them
    get a linux CD and stick that in, get to tha part about harddrives
    click format
    make a new partition(about5gb) on the end
    kill the install and put in your windows CD
    restart
    install windows onto the main harddrive
    setup your user
    copy all your files back
    install linux onto the small partition

    now you can use linux to fix it next time it fucks up, thats saved me so many times now
     
  10. Communist Hamster Cricetulus griseus leninus Valued Senior Member

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    3,026
    Tried the safe mode/Admin thing. Didn't work. Think I'll get a new PC soon anyway, but I'll carry on trying to get my files back 'cos I want them on my new PC.
     
  11. vslayer Registered Senior Member

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    4,969
    i need to get a new computer too, ill have to get a job and stop buying so much booze
     
  12. MagiAwen Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    225
    Document loss disturbs me. Does everyone have so much faith in technology? I mean, hell, I am steeped in it seemingly and apparently I am the only one in the world that does daily backups of important things to disk?

    Every week we must do at least a dozen recoveries for people of their data and everytime I ask, do you do backups? They are puzzled. These are the same people that tell us how ignorant they are about computers but yet seem to trust them so much? It seriously makes me wonder.

    Oh...this is not aimed at anyone here...just people in general.
     
  13. vslayer Registered Senior Member

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    4,969
    my computer is solely fo,r games and communictation, the little homework i do on it i backup onto all networked computers tho
     
  14. Communist Hamster Cricetulus griseus leninus Valued Senior Member

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    3,026
    Never mind, it has totally failed now, we are going to take it in to the shop to have it burne... I mean repaired. Or just get a new one. Thanks for the help anyway.
     
  15. StrayDogStrut Registered Member

    Messages:
    23
    Even though it sounds like you've given up, I wanted to throw in what I had to say. It sounds like you've somehow inadvertantly set up some sort of crazy dual boot of the same OS. I know you've probably already tried this, but if you haven't, be sure to try and access your files when selecting both versions of Windows XP during the boot. From what it sounds like, I would think it wouldn't work from either because one you tried to uninstall so it probably doesn't work, and the other was installed and does not have access to what you had saved earlier. I may be wrong about all of that, but whatever. I think it is well worth trying to boot to a linux CD and seeing what you can do from a copying files standpoint
     
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