Help Fast!!!!!!

[sphere]

i just booted windows, and it's gone back to how it was when i first installed it!! wallpapers, icons, shortcuts and all other settings are how they were when i first installed xp pro. the only thing that hasn't changed is the files!
it even said 'Take a tour of Windows XP...'

i can't logon as anything else, it's now administrator, i used to have it as User. i tried a restore and it couldn't restore for some reason!!!
i never logon as anything when i load windows.

HELP!!!! I WANT MY COMPUTER BACK!

 

[Lonman]

If you can't log out of the administrator account and then back in under your old account, I guess something got hammered in the old account that won't allow it to load. You might be stuck creating a new account and fixing it up the way you want again.

Quick question. Are you running Fat32 or the NTFS?

 

[sphere]

it's fat32

and i don't think i couldn've restored it to that, it was working fine, then i rebooted and WAMMO!

i think it might have something to do with the window's updates i installed from the website before i rebooted. i tried uninstalling these in the add/remove programes, but still no luck...

ah well

 

[Lonman]

I would have bet that it was fat32. Something got corrupted, no doubt. Next time you install, go with ntfs - I haven't lost a single cluster running ntfs. It offers a wide range of enhanced security features and is really stable. A lot of folks are concerned about taking the 'plunge' because of concern about data retrieval if they crash their system (I have to admit, I'm one of them). Now that I've used it for a while my concerns are really minimal now, BUT I'll keep my backup solution in place for a while longer - I have Win2k installed on a primary 2gig fat32 partition - I've never had to 'fall back' to it, but it's there as sort of a safety net for me. I use 2k because it will recognize the ntfs system and allow me to access XP's ntfs partition, if I ever need to. Anyway, I really recommend ntfs - I think it would help you to avoid these kinds of problems.

 

[sphere]

so you don't think i can bring it back?

what about a scandisk or defrag? this could fix the bad sectors you were talking about...?

 

[Lonman]

If a system restore didn't work then I'm willing to bet that you won't get that account working again. I don't have a clue why it's broke, and I may be wrong (hopefully) about not getting it back.