Recover missing Profile Folder. Please Help

[pleasehelpgreg]

Good Day All,

Excuse the rambling I'm panicking and trying to include all details. User's personal PC for Tax Business.

A user was having an issue with Windows logging in with a temporary profile. Having resolved this issue before. I went to the profile list in the registry and renamed the temp profile to .old and removed the .bak from the correct profile. However when I logged out and back in the temp profile returned. This time I created a new profile with admin rights.

I logged in with the new profile and tried to get to the user's files located under c:/user/(username however when I did this. Windows asked me if I would like to take ownership. I say yes it lets me in and no files!!! What happened to the files!? It was as if it created a new profile! no documents and everything under the profile gone

 

[USAFRet]

Disregard what may or may not be under the "profile". We know that is corrupted.
You need to find and recover the actual files. Assuming no one deleted them, they still exist on the drive somewhere.

And take this as a wakeup call for you to instruct your users about backups.

A $40 drive and some free software...we wouldn't be having this discussion.