Windows 2000 Profile Lost (W2K)

[JustinN]

Hi everyone,

I'm having a very strange problem with my system - any insight or advice would be very much appreciated.

Basically, I just went to use the computer and found it had automatically restarted itself. When I logged back on, almost everything had changed. My desktop background had disappeared, icons were missing, and all personal files (pictures, documents, pdf's) had also disappeared.

The configuration of the system seemed different as well -- it asked me for a user name now, whereas before I did not log on with a user name.

It was as if the system was entirely wiped out and started again, except that some programs were still present that were not originally on the machine (such as windows media player, which I had just installed the night before). This gives me hope that the rest of the data is still recoverable somewhere, but I am at a loss as to where to begin.

If anyone has encountered anything similar, I'd love to know.

Thanks a lot,

Justin

[motoflop]

Check folders under "c:\Documents and Settings". All profiles are stored there. Hopefully you find your orginal profile there and can move your old stuff back. For example if your user account is "xxx", then your desktop folder is by default "C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Desktop". Your problems sounds like windows couldn't use your original profile folder dor some reason and therefore created new profile with windows default settings. Check Event Viewer for error messages. That might give you some hints what had happened.