Urgent! Lost User Profile in documents and settings

[Salmissra]

I have a huge problem. After reconfiguring my computer to connect to a domain, I reboot the system, and I get an error to my system user profile stated lost data would be lost or get corrupted. The user created the new "melt" user and the original melt user profile became "melt.bak" under the document and settings folder. I proceeded to move the "melt.bak" folder to melt. However, from my network brother, he told me to rename "melt.bak to melt" and "melt to melt.old" ... when this happen and I reboot into "melt" and those system profile errors surfaced again. I lost all of my document settings, to both user profiles. I ended up with "melt.bak" and "temp" and nothing in there.

Is there any way to recover "melt" previous document and settings folder of information. I lost alot of important data, please help!!

I read earlier, not to do write or install anything on the hard drive, however, I deleted a folder not affected by the user profile, would that have any effect on retrieving the lost data?

Thanks,

Salmissra

 

[airbourne]

Ok, log in as the local admin. Browse to that MY DOCUMENTS folder. If the data is there, you can copy it somewhere else.

MY DOCUMENTS is a NAMESPACE folder. What that means is that it is connected to the registry. When you copied that profile information, what you did was replace the registry, that is why the problems you had before showed up again.

If you ever have to rebuild a profile because of corruption, generally you ONLY want to take folders such as FAVORITES, MY DOCUMENTS, perhaps DESKTOP. And any files that YOU specifically put in your profile. (I think that OUTLOOK puts the PST file in that location, but I'm not sure).

If you replace the registry files in a profile, you should have a specific reason why. Never do it for the hell of it, and never do it without backing the files up.

If you log in as the local admin and the data is still missing in that profile, then try to TAKE OWNERSHIP of the C drive (including subfolders and files). Then reset ALL of the C drive to EVERYONE FULL CONTROL. EVERYONE should be the ONLY group. If there is anything else, remove them. Be sure to Reset permissions of child objects and allow propigation. Now go back to that folder and see if the data is there.

If you have deleted the data and emptied the recycle bin, you will need to buy a data recovery program that will allow you to retrieve deleted data. When they say don't write more to the HD, it means that if a new file is written to the HD, it may be written to the same SECTOR on the HD. Even if you recreate a folder with the same name in the same location in windows explorer, that folder MAY or MAY NOT exist in the same sector of the HD.