As if losing most of my video files on Saturday wasn’t bad enough, on Tuesday my Windows user profile, aka documents and settings, was corrupted and I’ve only just managed to get it restored.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it is not a coincidence there was an automatic Windows update on Tuesday, judging by the fact that my frantic Google searches from the temporary profile Windows created suggested it wouldn’t be the first time a reboot after a Windows XP patch caused a bit of a meltdown.
After spending hours trying to figure out how to restore my local profile without losing all my settings, it turns out that the first time the computer automatically ran Check Disk on reboot it wasn’t set to repair errors.
So, if you ever receive this dreaded message on booting up: “Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off,” here’s what you do:
Before following all the advice to run system restore or create a new user profile and copy your documents and settings files over — which I tried to do before I realised my laptop drive isn’t big enough — run Check Disk because it may just be that your ntuser.dat file is corrupt.
- In My Computer, right-click the main hard disk.
- Click Properties, and then Tools.
- Under Error-checking, click Check Now, which brings up a dialog box titled Check disk options.
- Select both the “Automatically fix file system errors” and the “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” check boxes, then click Start.
- If it asks if you want to restart, click Yes and do so to run the scan.
