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Corrupted Profile

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by clive scotland

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A user today could not log on to the network, However when you logged on to the computer as administrator you could see the network, The network card was reinstalled, all protocols were reinstalled but still couldn't get on to the network. When going through user profiles and error stated that the user profile "John Doe" was corrupted. As a result of the corrupted profile all items on his desktop "disapeard".

My question is, Since I couldn't log on as that user and since his profile was corrupted, is there any way of me recovering those files, be it via the Registry or by some sort of tool?

7 replies

by rcom

Give this a shot,

The user.dat file was possibly corrupted. You can copy the contents from his original folder located in "documents and settings" into another folder. Delete him as a user and restart him again. Then copy the orignal folder contents back into his folder. Some settings may be lost but most will still be there. Then you can reassign whatever's left.

Good Luck!

by clive scotland

Thank you very much for your help, although what I should have said was that they computer was gunned down and reformated right before I posted this as I was following orders from my co-workers.However both answers that I got from you and Caluste are both correct just hope I can accept both answers. I remember when I did my MCSE course this sort of scenario came up, but unfortunately my memory has faded but your answer was indeed helpful so next time it occurs I know what to do.

by r. a. caluste

log on as another user with administrative privileges on the local machine. go to Documents and settings and under or ., you have your old user's files. However, you might find these unaccessible to other users. Take ownership of these folder and grant read and/or write access to that other user. copy mydocuments and other files to another folder. your outlook information is stored inside the local settings folder which is hidden. go to tools, folder options, selectthe show hidden and system files so you can see the local settings folder. if you are using outlook express, you can import the mails by running outlook and importing from another oe5 directory. browse under this directory, local setting/microsoft/identities and under this a directory made up of {num-num..}. as soon as you have all the files transfered to another directory, you can safely delete the profile via users and groups or system applet/profile and remake the old one.

hope this helps.

by r. a. caluste

log on as another user with administrative privileges on the local machine. go to Documents and settings and under or ., you have your old user's files. However, you might find these unaccessible to other users. Take ownership of these folder and grant read and/or write access to that other user. copy mydocuments and other files to another folder. your outlook information is stored inside the local settings folder which is hidden. go to tools, folder options, selectthe show hidden and system files so you can see the local settings folder. if you are using outlook express, you can import the mails by running outlook and importing from another oe5 directory. browse under this directory, local setting/microsoft/identities and under this a directory made up of {num-num..}. as soon as you have all the files transfered to another directory, you can safely delete the profile via users and groups or system applet/profile and remake the old one.

hope this helps.

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