Windows Settings/Account Gone!

[netyuppie]

i created a new partition/formated a drive, completly seperate from my system drive, and rebooted. everything seemed fine untill i was asked to log into windows.
i only have 1 user profile on this machine with a password (named ME), so when i logged in and wasnt asked to enter my password, i knew something was up. the profile name said ME, which confused me. it took about 4 minutes to log in, during which time a few error boxes came up saying something like "so and so file/setting cannot be found, a temporary profile will be created. all setting will be discarded when you restart".
the desktop was reset to the windows hills, and there was nothing on the desktop besides the recycle bin.
also, a text document with "[.ShellClassInfo] LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\System32\Shell32.dll,-21787" showed up at startup.
i found a solution to get rid of that ( http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;330132 ) which worked, but it didnt restore any of my settings.

i looked at user accounts in the control panel and no new accounts are shown or anything, but looking at documents and settings shows a new account named ME.PETER which i never had before. i think this is the user i'm being logged into, but i cant tell for sure, as the active username still says simply ME.

i tried to set a password on my old user (ME) and loged off, restarted, was was asked to enter the password, and again, blank desktop, no settings. so its confusing that i would be able to access my old user (ME) but its clearly not right. again, looking at documents and settings/ME , all of my desktop icons are there, but they arent ON the desktop.

i've tried about all i can think about, desperate for help/suggestions. everything is gone, desktop icons, mozilla settings & bookmarks, start menu.

[TheMamba]

Did you create the new partition on the same PHYSICAL drive that XP is installed on? If so...sounds like maybe some of your settings were in an area that you formatted...



Do you happen to have a restore point that you can revert back to?

Start > Help and Support > System Restore > Restore My Computer to an Earlier Time > Pick the restore point that would be right before you created the new partition.

[netyuppie]

no, the new partition was completly seperate.
and jesus, i wish i would have just thought about a system restore - 6am this morning, haha. o well, times of panic arent the best thinking conditions.
thanks mamba restored & running fine. gonna hold off on that new partition for a while, hehe.
still really curious how a completly seperate drive, creating a partition & formating could do that tho...weird. the second user profile ME.peter is gone too. o well

[diggrd]

Did the new partition change any of the existing drive letter assignments?

[netyuppie]

nope. had a c d e f g and the new partition was k

[diggrd]

That's strange, glad you could recover with TM's advice. We had issues kind of like that on a PC that we shared at work only it was NT4 and kept creating user.0 profiles on all of us except one guy who religiously cleared his IE cache and restarted the machine every time he logged out. Turned out to be something with available disk space, oh and that guy no longer works here he got fired for frequenting online dating sites and chat rooms at work

[TheMamba]

netyuppie....

Step by step...tell me how you originally installed the new drive and partitioned it. If I can see how you did it...maybe I can see if you're doing it incorrectly.

[netyuppie]

i've done plenty of hard drive installations, so i hope at least the installation and partition was fine. the only problem i can think of is this was a raid 0, and i'm pretty new to raid. the 2 drives (2x 36gb) were in my old machine as a raid 0 system drive (they were installed & everything by the company i bought the old pc from), so when i made this new machine i thought i'd try to add them in the same way. should be no problem huh? they showed up fine in the raid configuration tool from my mobo (asus k8vse, same mobo as the old pc), so i created a raid 0 with the 2 of them, restarted (user profiles still fine) and then created a partition spanning the entire drive (~70gb or whatever it ended up) and formatted and then rebooted. this is where all the "setting cannot be found, a temporary profile will be created. all setting will be discarded when you restart" started.
think thats about it. lemme know if i left anything out & thanks for the help.

Originally Posted by diggrd

Turned out to be something with available disk space

not an issue here. at least 40gb free on all my drives, 110 on my system.

[TheMamba]

Hmm...that sounds right to me. The Raid configuration is the only thing that comes to mind. And, only because I have never done it before.

The only thing I can really think of is make sure your raid controller drivers are all up to date. Maybe that made windows freak out.

I originally was thinking that you might need to reflash your mobo BIOS but it recognized the drives, etc so that's probably not it.

Maybe double check the slave/master/raid jumper settings on the drives?

Fuck man...this is a weird one.

[netyuppie]

i'm honestly not too sure what jumper settings i'd use on the raid drives, haha. i took them right out of one machine w/ the same mobo, put them in another tho, so jumpers were the same. i really need to read up on raid more when i get some time.
as for the related drivers, all up to date. and yea, even before i MADE the raid 0, the 2 drives showed up individualy in BIOS.
what confused me tho, is the drives as i said came from another PC where they were used as a raid 0 system drive. i didnt format them before i took them out and put them in my new machine. but of course they didnt try to boot from them, booted from from my designated system drive. it was then that i set up the array & partitioned/formatted. and i know that the format worked, as i was able to see the raid 0 blank & even write to it.
how ANY of this could effect a seperate physical drives user profiles...
i really have no need for raid, just thought it would be neat to include those drives instead of putting them to waste. i'm better off just grabbing 2 new larger hard drives