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  • #2272503

    WinXP Home – Need Help with User Accnts

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    by tslatts01 ·

    This may be an easy question for most of you. I have a Dell 2350, XP-Home, and allowed Windows to automatically download and update SP2 on it. Well, all my system would do is reboot, reboot, reboot, until I finally reinstalled XP-Home on top of the prior version (reinstalled it into the same Windows Folder without deleting it or starting from a fresh slate). It seems to work fine at the moment, but I had the family’s user IDs on the old system, each password protected at logon. Now, they are all missing from the logon screen, but all the files are there. The files are not viewable as they are protected and an error message appears “access denied”. Now, how can I get the user accounts to be displayed at the logon screen? I am concerned that if I simply readd as new accounts from Control Panel / User Accounts app, that it wil overwrite the data files in each one, losing the contents. Am I correct in that thinking or not? Any advise?

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    • #3143753

      Reply To: WinXP Home – Need Help with User Accnts

      by 3xp3rt ·

      In reply to WinXP Home – Need Help with User Accnts

      Don’t worry, if you create users with same name, Windows don?t overwrite the existing users folders. For recovering the encrypted data follow instructions from this link:

      http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/support/dataprot.mspx

    • #3143726
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      Reply To: WinXP Home – Need Help with User Accnts

      by hal 9000 ·

      In reply to WinXP Home – Need Help with User Accnts

      You’ll need to recreate the User Accounts and then with you logged in as Admin you’ll need to [b]Take Ownership of the various Files[/b] by following the directions at the following URL

      http://tinyurl.com/3aw7

      As far as SP2 goes you have some incompatible [b]Hardware[/b] installed and that is causing your main problem. The best way around this is to Download the newest BIOS Update available from Dell and [b]Flash the BIOS[/b] then remove all Burners that you may have installed and install SP2. After it’s installed you can then plug back in any Optical Drives that you removed and unless they are very old the system should then work.

      If it doesn’t you’ll need to look at flashing the Firmware of the Optical Drives or replacing them unless you have a lot of experience replacing the Optical Drives would generally be faster and easier than attempting to Flash their Firmware.

      Col

    • #3143684

      Reply To: WinXP Home – Need Help with User Accnts

      by blackcurrant ·

      In reply to WinXP Home – Need Help with User Accnts

      Hi

      Follow the instructions given in this forum:

      http://www.darkscorner.de/forums/viewtopic.php?t=351&start=15 (don’t worry – it is in English)

      Just perform the instructions on C:\Documents and Settings rather than X:\Documents and settings

      Good luck

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