I wish it were as simple as that. Vista only creates a windows.old directory
when you do a fresh install, not an upgrade.

My suspicions were correct, the profile had either been deleted or Vista
lost the file headers. I bought a program called Recover 2000 Pro, and the
profile indeed was deleted and needed to be recovered.

Usng that tool, I was able to recover about 50% of the lost data, only
becuase after a week of use on the hard drive, most of the data had been
overwritten or lost from normal hard drive use.

Has anyone else had any experience with a profile being deleted and rendered
useless?

"Mark Man" wrote:

> I found my old profile in C:\Windows.old\Documents and Settings\
>
>
> "-DEREK-" wrote:
>
> > I need help.
> >
> > I upgraded to RTM today and while my XP user profile is present in the
> > c:\users directory, but I cant access any of the documents, favorites, etc
> > from that profile any longer.
> >
> > I have about 1.5 gigs of info in the profile, but have tried everything –
> > copy to, mounting the volume from a remote computer, etc.
> >
> > When the upgrade was complete, originally everything came up -- my desktop
> > settings, docs, etc, just fine. Then, I turned off UAC and rebooted, and
> > when I logged in, Vista created an entirely new profile.
> >
> > I have taken ownership of the directory, logged in as a local and network
> > administrator, upgraded all the user accounts to administrator, etc...no luck.
> >
> > What am I missing here?
> >