This is for a friends PC. She was having problems with a program she just installed and decided to use system restore. What she didn’t realize was she was using HP’s system restore and not XP’s restore.
When it was done the PC was restore to how it was when she got the PC a few years back. The HP restore said it does not delete files so I started looking for them and this is what I found. The profile folder that she was using previous to the restore and the profile folder she is using now are different.
If you try to click on the old profile folder it says access denied. So I started up in safe mode went in to the Administrator account and went to the security for that folder. I changed the owner of the folder to administrator and made sure it had full access. I also made sure that the box was checked to apply to all subfolders and files. I logged out of the PC and logged back in as administrator and I could access the old profile folder but I could not access any of the other folders. SO I tried taking ownership to the My documents folder, repeated the above steps and it still would not work.
So I decided to rename the 2 profiles so that the PC would boot up in to the old profile. The PC did boot up in the old profile but access was still denied. I also changed the access back to “owner” and I even tried it in safe mode.
My friend has no back up of these files and there are many important documents that she needs to get to. She is an indepenant accountant and many client files are at risk. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
This is a HP Desktop running Windows XP Home with SP2
