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I just started my laptop and found all my profiles gone.

My Firefox addons gone, background image is different, desktop icons are differeent etc etc.

I am not sure what happened.

Can anyone tell me how to fix this please?

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Were you part of a domain? –  John T Jan 2 '10 at 16:19

3 Answers 3

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Have you tried the built-in "System Restore" function of Vista? Give that a try; reset back to a few days ago, and see if that fixes it.

If not then unfortunately there's about 1000 other 'answers', all of which would require further interrogation. I believe that interrogation would go beyond the scope of this single question, and you may want to consider taking it to someone who knows what they're doing before going too far trying to 'fix' it.

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This is a bit similar like: "I felt a sharp pain in my arm and now I can't move my leg." We don't have enough information about what happened exactly. To find what happened, the best way would be by visiting a specialist. If there's no hurry, just continue to wait for answers here but be aware that the longer you use that laptop, the smaller the chance of recovery will be.

My first guess is that you've re-installed Vista again. Then all you can do is put back a backup, if you have one. Else, sorry... Your data will be gone although a specialist might recover it for an enormous amount of cash.

Or maybe you've logged on with a different user account. In that case, log in with your regular account again.

There are a lot more reasons why this happened so we will need to know what you did -exactly- before this all happened.

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"My first guess is that you've re-installed Vista" = funny. :) –  Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Jan 3 '10 at 0:17
Interestingly enough, a re-install of Windows did occur on a laptop of mine. All I had to do was to use the Recovery disk. Unfortunately, I hoped it would recover my Windows installation but instead, it just erased the whole partition and put the original OEM version of Windows back. A badly-designed recovery disk made by the company who delivered the laptop might do such a thing... –  Wim ten Brink Jan 3 '10 at 10:23

First of all you should open up my computer and navigate to c:\users**your username**\documents, just to see if all of your data is there.

If you did find your data it means that the current profile has been damaged, the safe way to repair the problem would be to follow the instructions found here

This should correct the damaged profile and get you back up and running.

if there is no data to folder I pointed you to you can check c:\windows.old if it exists your data may be there as well.

If you do not see any data in the either folder you may wish to consult a recovery firm to attempt to recover any important lost data.

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