Temporary Profile - Registry

Hi, my computer randomly switched off yesterday and when I switched it on, I was lead to start-up repair.

I carried it out, and upon re-starting, it took me to 'preparing your desktop' and I was logged into a temporary profile. After being completely stressed that I had lost all my files and encountering this issue for the first time, I realised that they were actually still at C:\Users\Shafiq with a locked icon. I could still access these files going through them.

I'm more of a self-fixer, and fix most problems myself, however - this one I just can't seem to get my head around.

I've read around, and anyone familiar with this issue may understand the fixes I've tried which I'll refer to in short hand form. I'll also list a few more principles with my problem. Compared to all the countless threads and fixes i've tried/read on the issue, mine seems to be really different in a few ways.

1. I ran a chkdsk of C:/ which took about 6 hours
2. I ran a sfc /scannow before & after the chkdsk
3. I tried changing the registry SID's of the profiles, removing .bak from one and adding .temp to the other.
4. I tried a system restore on a couple of occasions
5. I tried to go to the management console to view the event logs, which worked before the system restore, but now isn't working.
6. I had 2 users before, one was for uni work and one was my main user. They were named WORK and SHAFIQ. C:\users\work and c:\users\shafiq respectively. In all problems I've read about, the .bak file has a profileimagepath to the user that is inaccessible, such as the above 2. However, mine is to C:\Users\Administrator

In the images at the end of the post there'll be quite a few irrelevant user profiles, some of which I creatted when trying to fix the problem myself, so it's just one big mess now with a bunch of profiles that don't even show up on the log on screen anyway.

Yes maybe I can just make a new user and transfer, but I don't think that will restore my computer to the way it was. Some things have changed in the sense that when I am on the log in screen. There is an "Administrator" account (which is the temp profile) and "Other Accounts". If I make a new account, I have to go to other accounts and manually type in the username and leave the password field blank to log in. Same with the administrator account - It asks me for a password, which I have to leave blank to log in. Why is it even asking me for a password?

Also, on control panel user/accounts section, my old accounts don't appear anywhere at all, where-as in the guides it says to delete your old account from there.

I managed to change the "ProfileImagePath" of a new admin account I created to one of my old accounts, and now when I log in it loads the old account. But I still have to click "Other Account" from the login screen and manually type in a username and password of the administrator account I made.

I honestly think my registry is messed up - and is there any way to fix the user profile keys or set them default. Will a windows 7 repair installation do this or does it not fix the registry keys.

Thanks ahead for any assistance, and also - I can provide any screenshots or whatever if needed, just ask.

Brink said:

Hello Shafski, and welcome to Seven Forum.

You might see if the tutorial below may be able to help with this error for you. :)

User Profile Error - Logged on with a Temporary Profile

ThIs is where my situation differs from other similar issues I've seen

A) In the right pane, look at the ProfileImagePath to see if this is the same user account that you deleted in step 1 above.

As shown in the screenshot above, it links to c: users/Administrator rather than my old profile. What do I do instead?

Just to update you on the situation, as I posted this thread I was running a repair of Windows 7. That completed a bit after and it seemed to fix the admin account being a temporary profile. Now I had 3 accounts with functioning profiles (Including the root admin account), and then my old folders in C:\users of my old files.

I tried moving the 150gb of data from one of my old user profiles from c:\users onto the new functioning one, and voila - within a few minutes 150GB was transferred. Wait.. what? Yep, too good to be true.

When I logged on the account, everything was giving me permission errors, including my computer/control panel - which I couldn't even open! I couldn't do a thing! Anyways, I thought I'd restart.

When I restarted, chkdsk ran, and so I let it run thinking maybe it would fix that.

But no - it made the new profile I made a temporary profile too now, and so yeh.. Im stuck. I got a bunch of error messages about invalid security rule and setting to default rule (which made me think maybe it was correcting the problem and fixing permissions) but instead it made it a temp profile. So yeh..

Any ideas?

Brink said:

The only thing that you should copy over from another used account are files in the Music, Documents, etc.. folders. All others will mess the profile up.

But what about appdata? For programmes I downloaded with settings on my old user