Member Avatar for AtlantaEighty8

I already posted this in the windows forum before realizing there was a forum for precisely this. Anybody who can help, please do.

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Alright, this is fairly urgent, so if any of you could help me out, I would be very grateful. As of yesterday evening when my mother was using this computer, everything was fine. All systems and documents seemed normal. When I got on last night, practically every document on the PC seemed to have disappeared. This was limited to pictures and text files, and only the local ones I believe, as items in the shared folder seem to have been spared. In addition, no programs were modified by this. It was only the documents on the computer. This morning when I logged on, it gave me this message as I signed on to the profile for Owner:

Windows cannot load the locally stored profile. Possible causes of this error include insufficient security rights or a corrupt local profile. If this problem persists, contact your network administrator.


DETAIL - An I/O operation initiated by the registry failed unrecoverably. The registry could not read in, or write out, or flush, one of the files that contain the system's image of the registry.

I don't understand what this means, or what I can do about it. If anybody can give me some advice, I would be unbelievably grateful. Thank you in advance for your help
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Thank you very much.

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Dani AI

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The symptoms described by — personal files missing from the local account while shared folders remained accessible and the Owner profile failing to load — are consistent with a corrupted user profile or a damaged user registry hive. was right to flag profile corruption as the likely cause, and ’s nudge to look further down for solutions is noted. Immediate priorities are data preservation, then diagnosis and repair.

First step: rescue the files before attempting repairs. Boot to Safe Mode (F8) and try the built‑in Administrator account; if that works, copy the entire affected profile folder (C:\Documents and Settings\<username>) to an external drive. If Administrator won’t load, boot from a Linux live CD, Windows PE/BartPE, or the XP Recovery Console and copy files. Example commands to run from an elevated prompt or recovery environment:

chkdsk C: /f /r
xcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\Owner" "E:\OwnerBackup" /E /H /K

After data is backed up, check disk health and system logs (Event Viewer) — the registry I/O message can indicate disk errors. Run chkdsk first, then try repairing the profile. As Administrator, run regedit, export the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList (backup), locate the SID for the affected account, and look for duplicate SID keys where one ends in “.bak”. The usual non-destructive fix is to rename keys so the good SID has no “.bak”, set RefCount and State to 0, close regedit and reboot. If that feels risky, create a fresh user account and copy the rescued files into its profile.

Caution: editing the registry and running disk repairs can make things worse if done incorrectly. Always back up data and export registry keys before changes. If chkdsk reports bad sectors or the drive shows SMART errors, prioritize replacing the disk and restoring from backups. If unsure, seek hands‑on help to avoid permanent data loss.

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Member Avatar for DMR

That does sound like corruption of a user profile, althought the cause might not be of a malicious nature. Do you if any changes at all were made to the system just prior to the problem occurring?

See if any of the information and suggestions in this thread can help:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Q_21307901.html

Member Avatar for AtlantaEighty8

I'd rather not subscribe to any services, unless I absolutely must. Is there anybody here who can copy and paste the response for me? Otherwise, does anybody know if it would be easy to drop my subscription after the first month?

Member Avatar for Catweazle

Did you scroll down? The answer to that is visible on my PC, and I'm most certainly NOT logged in there!

Member Avatar for DMR

Did you scroll down? The answer to that is visible on my PC, and I'm most certainly NOT logged in there!

Exactly. You don't have to subscribe; just scroll further down the page to view the thread.

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