Account deleted by Vista? Need to recover data.

[chris0101]

Yesterday, I woke my PC up from sleep and I found something strange had happened. The PC returned a BSOD, told me that I had a memory error and then restarted.

Upon restarting, I promptly logged in, determined to find out what was wrong. Within 1 minute of logging in, I was shocked to realize that the desktop was empty, my documents was completely gone and everything was gone! Suddenly, there was another BSOD and my PC again restarted. After 5 restarts, I realized that there was a serious problem.

I have 2 operating systems installed on my PC:

Vista Ultimate x64 and Vista Ultimate x86 (which I seldom use now)

I had recently upgraded my RAM so I ran the memory diagnostic. It failed. I then replaced my old RAM and the BSODs and restarts still continued. Not sure why. I could not boot in safe mode or safe mode with networking either. This was another problem.

Utterly frustrated, I got out my Vista x64 DVD and reinstalled Vista. I am in the process now of reinstalling my apps. However, my question is, how can I recover my original user account's files? There are some files in there that are very important to me. Also, what could have caused this?

The error codes in the blue screen are:

0x00000050
0x00000023
0x0000001A

Apart from bad RAM (I will get an exchange at the store now). Registry attacking virus?

However, my biggest concern right now is attempting to recover my old files. They were not in the Windows.old folder. In fact I opened it up and there were no user accounts at all! My user account had been deleted even before I reinstalled Vista, but what happened? And how can I get my data back?

Thank you.

[dontgvadamn]

I had this problem before....it was a registry screw up. somejhow vista renamed my registry entry for my account to .bak

to fix it I had to go into the registry find the one that was changed and rename itso the .bak was gone. then poof there it is.

[chris0101]

The problem is that I had to reinstall Vista so I can't do that anymore.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dontgvadamn

I had this problem before....it was a registry screw up. somejhow vista renamed my registry entry for my account to .bak

to fix it I had to go into the registry find the one that was changed and rename itso the .bak was gone. then poof there it is.