Hello everyone

Can someone out there please help me.

I switched on this morning and my settings, desktop and data files are all missing.

The Windows 2K tutorial screen came up, which usually only appeared when I first installed it on the pc, years ago.

The applications are still in programs, but MS office 2002 and all other applications all have to be reinstalled.

I have re instaleld IE and Outlook so I could get some help online

Surprisingly my daughter and wife's setting are all okay, when I log into thier account.

It appears only mine has been totally lost.

MY email, excel, word doc's etc alll gone.

I am running an ACER veriton 7200 desktop
windows 2k spk4 and until last last night all udates etc were present.
I run avast 4.8 anti virus (only been using for a week or so) as AVG 8 I had problems with it.

I dont think AVG is an issue as I have been using Avast happily for over a week without any issues.

I am desperate to get back all my data, as I have been stupid enough not to have backed it up properly on another device or media.

My restore / recovery points are missing from the system folders as well.

I dont know what to do.

Has anyone ever heard of something like this before.?
If you need more detaisl please let em know and I will oblige as much as I can.

The last person on the machine last night was my duaghter on MSN, and she is pretty sensible about downloading etc.. so hope it is nothing to with this.

Please excuse my poor typing and spelling

Help me if you can

Thnx

Hariomash

Hello Heriomash, welcome to PCHF.

It's sounds like your running a new profile Herio, or your profile has been recreated. I can't see any other software which would have caused this, because it is a manual windows process.

This may seem like a silly task, but just make sure you haven't logged onto a new profile, instead of your old one. Go to Start, Settings, Control Panel. Go to Users and Passwords, and see what's listed there.

Dear madmonkey

Appreciate the rapid response and the warm welcome.

I look at the user /profile, but I haven't created a new profile because it still wanted my password and logon. And I'm the only administrator.
There were no extra user visible.

If it has been recreated somehow, how do I go back and get my data?
Thank you for your thoughts Madmonkey.

Regards

Hariomash

Does anybody else know your password Hario?

From your description, that's definitely a new profile you have. So going back to get it is not that simple. Your system does not backup your personal data automatically. System Restore only keeps your most important system files and settings, so taking backups of your own personal data is important.

There are recovery tools you can use, such as R-Studio. I always recommend R-Studio because I think it's your greatest chance for success and has saved my bacon a few times in the past, but unfortunately comes with a price tag (Buy R-Studio Data Recovery Software 4.2). The possibility of recovery is dependant on weather or not that same area on this disk where your personal data was has been overwritten. You may want to download the demo first, to make sure that the files are still retrievable before buying the full version for the recovery.

I had the same problem just a few minutes ago. In my case w2k has lost the folder for one user profile, but when i looked in the explorer the old one was still under "documents and settings". the solution of my problem was in the registry under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
there is an entry for every userprofile and in this entry there is a key named
ProfileImagePath
and the value was the path to the new create image path. After setting this value to the old value everything works fine.