Member Avatar for smartintelleng

So heres what happened, I had just finish fixing my computer, than restarted it only to find out it wouldnt start. I am a university student, and was in desperate need of my computer moreso for the files on them, so i installed windows xp pro sp2 over the other windows xp pro sp2 not formating or partition the drives cause the files that were on there are important to me. Doing so, while making a different user account named eric(during installation) because i was scared that windows would delete the files for my old user account named whatever. So my other account is namely still there, in documents and settings under the folder whatever which represents my old user account. The problem is, that windows doesnt consider the folder whatever as an account. So i tried making an account named whatever hoping that windows would use the folder whatever. Instead it made a new folder called whatever.ERICORE. ERICORE was my computer name that i chose during installation. Oh i forgot to mention that i found a way to access the folder whatever and all its contents because typically before it was a protected user account; this is a security feature in xp among other OS. So now im left with a folder called whatever which i can access anything, which is ok, but the question is how do I make that folder whatever, which is again in documents and settings as all user accounts are found, how do i make it a user account, so that it can load all my programs as it did before with my whatever account. If there is no solution to this problem, im stuck finding, downloading and installing hundreds of software, to rehabilitate my computer to do all the tasks it did with my old account whatever. I am very knowledgeable and more than competent in computers( for example i am a visual c++ programmer)
Thanks for beeing considerate and reading this
Your help is appreciated.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by tayspen

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A reliable way to recover the original profile without reinstalling everything is to re-associate the old profile folder with its user SID in the registry and fix the folder permissions. and pointed toward repair/backups; the procedure below is an alternative that often restores the old profile intact.

  1. Back up everything first (copy the entire old profile folder to an external drive and export the registry branch HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList).
  2. Log on with an Administrator account (not the account to be fixed) and run regedit.
  3. Browse to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. Each subkey is a user SID. Inspect each ProfileImagePath to find the SID that points to the original folder and the SID that points to the new .machine folder.
  4. If a SID key ends with .bak and another identical SID exists without .bak, restore the .bak key: rename the non-.bak key (append .temp), remove .bak from the original key so it becomes active, then set the RefCount and State DWORD values in that key to 0 (create them as DWORD if missing). Close regedit and reboot — Windows will load the now-active profile.
  5. If access is blocked by permissions, disable Simple File Sharing (Explorer -> Tools -> Folder Options -> View -> uncheck "Use simple file sharing"), open the old profile folder Properties -> Security -> Advanced -> Owner, change owner to Administrators (or the target user) and check "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects", then grant Full Control.

Cautions: always export the registry branch before edits. If the old ntuser.dat hive is corrupt the registry swap will not help; in that case copy data (Desktop, My Documents, Favorites, AppData\Roaming for settings) into a clean profile but avoid overwriting live ntuser.dat. Some applications store machine-wide entries and may still require reinstall.

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Member Avatar for gemini4

What you did is called parallel instalation. There is no way of accessing the programs from the old installation unless you repair it. What you can do now is backup all your files on cd's and then boot from the windows xp cd and choose to repair the old installation.

Member Avatar for tayspen

Yea, he ^ is right from what i gathered from your post. it was kinda confusing at times. It also sounded like you wanted to set the path of the My documents folder to the "whatever" folder? Is that correct, or am i way off.

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