Question Accidental Removal Of .bak File In Windows 10 Registry!

[HardAsARockie]

Hello! Yesterday night, I was aiming to change the name of my C drive user folder. I did this, but then I was logged into a temporary user. I was going to use the registry to re-route my sign in to the new pathway, but as things kept failing and failing, I am now stuck at not being able to log onto Windows. Here are the steps I have tried to get everything back:

1.) Change pathway in regedit (accidentally deleted .bak file in profile lists as misinterpretation of tutorial)

2.) Logging back into Windows. Notices that all personal data correlated with users is gone. Other files remain untouched, especially in my separate HDD drive.

3.) Restore to a restore point attempted, but unsuccessful as restore point wasn't executed correctly when made.

4.) Used EaseUS to recover any lost files (losing hope at an exponential rate) couldn't locate any .bak folder or anything of relative size.

5.) Changing strategy, I looked at any possible way to restore the registry to a backup to solve the problem.

6.) Restarted Windows, went into command prompt in the recovery partition of windows, typed in the code "xcopy c:\Windows\System32\config\RegBack c:\Windows\System32\config /y" Line I found when I discovered Windows automatically backs up the registry. (Maybe they don't because the line didn't work or I didn't do it correctly.)

7.) I am now stuck out of windows and am unable to launch safe mode for some reason.

I'm planning to get my computer checked out tomorrow, but was wondering if there is any possible solution to this problem without completely re-installing windows. I would greatly appreciate it if I could recover my lost personal data, but at this point I doubt it can be done. Thank you so much for reading, and if you would like to share anything it would mean the world to me. I really don't know what's going to come out of it or what damage I have done. Thank you.

 

[USAFRet]

Have some external drive handy
Create a Linux Live CD or USB
Boot from that
Navigate around until you find your personal files. Not the Registry or anything, or applications...just your personal files.
Copy them to the external
Once you're sure you have everything...do a full wipe and reinstall of Windows.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows... forums.tomshardware.com

For future reference:

1. Never make any changes in the Registry without a known good backup that you made
2. A full drive backup would have been easy to recover from
3. Any tutorial that speaks about editing the Registry, and does not start with "Make a backup of the Registry!" in big red letters should be ignored

What were you actually trying to do? "change the name of my C drive user folder " ?
Why?

 

[onespeedbiker]

3.) Restore to a restore point attempted, but unsuccessful as restore point wasn't executed correctly when made.

Restore is turned off by default in Windows 10, so if it is not turned on and configured, the restore points contain no data.

6.) Restarted Windows, went into command prompt in the recovery partition of windows, typed in the code "xcopy c:\Windows\System32\config\RegBack c:\Windows\System32\config /y" Line I found when I discovered Windows automatically backs up the registry. (Maybe they don't because the line didn't work or I didn't do it correctly.)

The RegBack registry save was done away with by Windows 10 in the 1803 version. The location still exists, as do the files, but they contain no data.