Lost Program Icons 1

[dhaywood]

HI,

I recently had a problem on our Windows 2K server where I ran out of disk space on the primary partition where the OS is installed. Each time I tried to run a program within the Admin Tools group I received the error 'Disk Full' which was faor enough but I also discovered the icons for each program I tried to run in the start menu were disappearing.

I have now resolved the lack of disk space by moving ther exchange database to a larger partition but the icons have not made a miraculous reappearance.

Could someone please tell me how to get these back. I currently have to go via the help system to gain acces to 2 or 3 frequently used programs.

Many thnaks

Duncan

 

[ReddLefty]

The easiest way I would think would be to restore your "Documents and Settings" folder in your system drive. in that folder you will have the profiles of every user that has logged onto that machine plus two default users called "All Users" and "Default User". All icons reside in two areas: "Start Menu/..." and "Desktop" within those profiles.

You can restore the entire Documents and Settings or you can restore the individual profiles you think has lost your icons. Best yet, you can restore just the Desktop and Start Menu of a particular user if your sure that's all that's missing.

Bare in mind that some icons are often in "All Users". The "All Users" profile basically does what it says, it will add to all users whatever is in there.

Default User is the profile used when a new profile is created.

All other profiles in "Documents and Settings" should match usernames either locally or in the domain.




"In space, nobody can hear you click..."

 

[dhaywood]

Thanks for the quick reply.

The shortcuts usually reside in the all users-start menu-programs-administator tools program group. And it looks like this is the place they're going from and I'm not sure where else to look for them. Normally this type of core windows tool would reside somewhere in the winnt directory.

When you say I could restore these icons is that meant in the loose term of manually copying them or is there an option somewhere to automatically restore them??

Thanks

Duncan

 

[ReddLefty]

I meant from your Tape Backup (if any). When you ran out of space, it sounds like your system could not update the current profile you were logged into. You would need to restore an older one (from a day or two) from a tape backup to get back the corrupted area. It was probably NTUSER.DAT that was corropted... it has odd consequences when that file is corrupted... but I'm only guessing. It's kinda impossible to know.

If you don't have a backup, you could always log into another account that has admin rights, delete the Administrator profile (rename it to be safe) and relog with the Administrator account. You will get the Default Profile with no icons, but at least any weird problems like launching your programs might be fixed. You can test it from another profile actually.. before removing the Administrator profile.

Good luck.




"In space, nobody can hear you click..."

 

[dhaywood]

Jeez' how dumb can I be... sorry for the missunderstanding.

Yes of course we have tape backups and I'm an idiot for not thinking of it first.

Many thanks again for your assistance and helping me see what I should have alreadyt thought of.

Cheers

Duncan