PC crashes

[ppppenguin]

I found a route via safe mode to enable the hidden admin account. I found that the drive letters had been muddled so it was hardly surprising that the OS couldn't find my user folder on the D drive as it was now on the E drive. Put all that right with disk management. Still couldn't get to my own user account.

Deleted the hidden admin account and my user account still didn't work.

Went via safe mode and found a restore point on March 15th. Did that. Now I get a different effor message: Group policy client service failed the logon

[Nick]

Nope - what it's now done is probably created another profile for you. I'm not an expert in this, but I suspect that you are now in the territory of having to create a new user account using the hidden admin account and then to copy all your files over from the C:\Users\\ tree...

There is a registry hack that may be able to recover the old profile, but messing with the registry at this level is something that you have to be very careful about.

I would keep the admin account arround - its very useful

[ppppenguin]

While I was at it, I reset the BIOS to defaults. This broke the hot pluggability of the removeable HDD so I've fixed that.

I've done the delete account, create account stuff, remembering to take a copy of my user data first. I've got my account back but it's lost a lot of stuff, including my Firefox bookmarks, ad all the windows personalisation settings. I'm having a look on my backup HDDs to see if I can find and restore them.

[Nick]

I feel your pain.

Of course, if you used Chrome and were logged into your Google account, then all your bookmarks would be saved in the cloud

You may be able to find your Firefox bookmarks:

• Type in WINDOWS+R
  
• In the box, type C:\Users\\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
  
• See if the old profile is there but has been renamed.
  
• If you find it (or the default if there is only one), copy the data into your new profile name equivalent location.
  

The AppData directory is normally hidden, so you have to unhide it in Explorer or explicitly type the path.

Cheers

[ppppenguin]

I can recover my bookmarks from elsewhere easily enough. Not quite up to date but good enogh. I think that the real problem is that the user profile folders are now badly mucked up so heaven knows what else will be broken. I'm on the verge of doing a clean install of W7 and all my software. My data is all backed up (it's all on the physically separate D drive and not in the user folder except for some very minor bits)

Anything to watch out for as I'm doing the install? Would be nice to cure the crashes at the same time.

[Nick]

Soooo close... then yet sooooo far

I would do what I suggested to repair the current installation using DISM, then if we need to do more, we can do a Windows 7 repair using the original disk. Lots of examples of how to do this, e.g. http://www.pcworld.com/article/243190/ho...ation.html 

[ppppenguin]

I think I'll go the 100% certain route of a clean build.

[ppppenguin]

Windows has just re-installed. There are 8 admin events so far. 6 warnings about the VGA driver (it's on generic default drivers until I install the Radeon one so fair enough) A warning about the searchindex doing a full reset. Again fair enough. And a WMI error 10 which is apparently common and harmless. Can be got rid of:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help...er-2008-r2

[ppppenguin]

Whole slew of errors when I installed the mobo drivers. Mainly 4107 CAPI2: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/For...rosecurity

[ppppenguin]

The PC is now up and running though not with all the software I had installed before. Notably I haven't installed all the hefty Xilinx stuff. 2 other notable omissions so far are Classic Shell (to make windows explorer behave more like XP) and moving the Users folder to the D drive. This latter is done with a symlink following a method I found online.

All the 200+ winodws updates being installed at the moment.

Loads of errors in the system log.

So far no crashes.