Corrupt XP user profile (which mysteriously dissapears)
Customer believes that he has corrupted his PC and it will need a windows reinstall.
The PC gave a corrupt user profile message… and most importantly, the cable internet then stopped working.
Seems that the PC would randomly reset… but not often enough for me to diagnose.
I suspect a faulty PS or some other hardware failure. Anyway, it managed to start… looks like its using user profile “ABC” (from name on the top of the start button menu)… but running a command prompt takes me to c:documents and settingsTEMP.{some hex number} (and there happens to be a user profile with the same name!)
Looking at the “ABC” profile, all the desktop icon, favorites, etc, are all still there… good.
I create an ABC.bak folder (so I can backup the profile before I start working on it).
The customer asks me a quick question… when I turn back to the PC, I find the whole ABC folder tree is gone!
I do a search on the whole c: drive, deleted items folder, etc… but I cannot find any trace… 🙁 not good 🙁
I try restarting… This time I get no “corrupt user profile” error… strange… I see the ABC folder… I take a look inside… and I see that it just has default settings… the customers data has vanished.
Luckily, he has a backup (a few months old) of his my documents… but that doesn’t help with favorites and outlook express emails and addresses.
So I recover the my documents, setup the telstra cable internet connection, and setup his email.
After that, I recommend that he backs up more frequently, and that he expands the backup to include at least the documents and settings folder, or even better: the whole drive (minus the windows folder, so everything will fit onto 1 blank DVD).
But the vanishing user profile is very mysterious!
Had a similar event with XP removing a user after I added a new user a/c. XP would only accept the new user as ‘Administrator’ even though there was an existing 1 & both a/c’s existed until I rebooted then original admin a/c was gone – with no system or data (My Docs folder) files visible. I found that restoring the system to an earlier time resurrected the old admin a/c & files, but removed the new user a/c whilst leaving new user “profile” & system files, etc. Trying to re-create the same new user a/c added a trailing {name}”.something” descriptor which then caused further problems such as ‘Start’ menu empty, IE6 wouldn’t work (cyclic reloading of pages as soon as ‘Done’ appeared), etc. I had to create another new admin a/c to change the dud 1 to ‘Limited’ to delete it & manually remove system files/profile, etc.
Interesting.
I couldn’t do a system restore, as too much time had passed.