Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

computer acts like factory restore every time i turn it on.

Sep 30, 2010 4:03PM PDT

Ok this is a little commplicated, My dad has a rent to own store and stored all his supplier contacts and account data on his personel computer its about 5 years worth of stuff. Yesterday my sisster tryed to get on face book and it froze. we did a hard shut down and today when he turned it on the EULA for dell came up along with all the startup programs like it was a new computer trying to set up. All the data is gone and every time you turn it on it acts like its the first time. Not instaling windows but wants to set everything up. so I went to download recuva to see if I could get some of the files back and it would get to 100% and start to verify and freze. So I saved it and it still froze but it was in my downloads folder anyway. But when ever I run it his computer shuts off. I would like to add that if it did a factory restore like I think nobody did it and it never reinstaled windows. My mom said that they had to create a new account today when they turned it on. any help would be apprieciated and I can give you any info you need.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
i forgot to mention
Sep 30, 2010 4:22PM PDT

when you log in to his user acount it says it cant access user acount and its giving me a temporary account so thats why its wanting to resetup everything cause its not saveing anything.

- Collapse -
Ahh, the old corrupt profile problem.
Sep 30, 2010 4:28PM PDT

Google VISTA CORRUPT PROFILE for a known issue.
Google VISTA TAKE OWNERSHIP if you have trouble copying out files.
Bob

- Collapse -
thanks
Oct 4, 2010 11:32AM PDT

thanks that worked for most of it but there are still some important word documents missing. I dont know why some showed up but others didnt. I know he had them saved as icons for easy access if that helps. any ideas on how to find the rest of the files or are we just S.O.L.

- Collapse -
Did you use the command line?
Oct 4, 2010 11:54AM PDT

When I know the name of the file I open a command prompt (right click and run as admin) then...

DIR \mydoc*.doc /s/a/p

That will list all the docs found given they start with mydoc.
Bob