Repost - can anybody help? Windows XP Profiles gobbled up all my data!

From: Dave Rado (drado@onetel.net.uk)
Date: 09/29/02 

From: "Dave Rado" <drado@onetel.net.uk>
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2002 20:34:28 +0100

Hi all

I recently bought a new laptop with Windows XP on it, and spent several
weeks formatting it to have several partitions for different versions of
Office, customising Win XP to be the way I wanted it, installing all my
(50+) applications on it and customising them the way I wanted them to be,
and transferring all my data to it from my old Windows 98 machine.

I then took my new machine into work, connected to the network, and
immediately got a rude shock, because although I logged in to the network
using the same username as I use as home, instead of using my existing
profile, it created a new one, using all the XP default settings, pointing
to an empty My Documents folder instead of my own 3GB My Documents folder;
and all of my applications lost their settings as well (e.g. Word was had
all the default settings and was using Microsoft's templates, instead of
having the settings I had created.

I searched the Google groups and found that lots of people have this
problem. I couldn't find any explanation as to why Microsoft think that
laptop users wouldn't want to be able to use their own profiles when logging
into a network rather than have the default one imposed on them; but I did
find a post in the archives which seemed to offer a solution: it said:

---------------
- Open Regedit on laptop

- locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
- Scroll through the SID keys looking at the values for the
"ProfileImagePath". You should find 2 different paths (in 2 different SID
keys) for the user that will look something like
%SystemRoot%\Profiles\username and %SystemRoot%\Profiles\username.domainname
- Modify the path with the .domainname extension to be the same as the
other. Usually, this merely means removing the .domainname, so that both
paths are %SystemRoot%\Profiles\username

- Close regedit, logon using the domain account

Now both accounts are sharing the single profile.
---------------

That looked promising so I tried it. And when I logged back in to the
network, guess what happened .... my personal profile just disappeared in a
puff of smoke! (Or rather, a new default profile was created, with my name,
overwriting my previous profile, containing no data apart from the default
files). All my customisations were lost, all my data was lost. Restoring
the registry settings to what they had been didn't bring my profile back.

Although my data is no longer visible (even with hidden files visible), it
must still be on my hard disk somewhere, because I have no more free disk
space now than I had before the disaster happened (which means that, even if
I wanted to, I couldn't restore my data, because there's no longer enough
free space for all of it!)

Can anyone help?

Yours, hanging onto sanity by a thread,

Dave

Relevant Pages

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