Lost all standard users after secedit default security restore.

[Mark]

Seem to have lost the ability to logon as any of the users (barring the admin
a/c) that I had on the system before I used a secedit command to restore the
security for Vista Home Premium to default. Here's the command:

secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose

Now, I have the folders for each user, in the C:\Users folder, but no logon
profile for any user except the only admin a/c which I used to reset the
security settings to default. I have backups that contain data but system
restore only lets me restore back to a time when I had the user problem in
the first place. (which is the reason I "pressed the reset button")

I can't choose to log on as any user other than the default admin a/c, (lets
call it Sally for now), so what I want to do is restore the users.

I have tried to go into the control panel, users section, but this gives me
an error message about not being able to use special charachters such as
!$%?> etc, when I try to create a user with the same name as names that are
already in the C:\Users folder (my choice of username).

I would appreciate any insight as to which method I can use to restore my
users without reinstalling and recovering the data from backup.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Mark.

 

[Jon]

Hi

The easy route would be to create a new user, copy over the important files
and folders from your other accounts, delete them completely and recreate
them with the same names - copying back the data from each subsequently.

This is more of a long shot technique which may or may not work...

You mentioned that you have backups. Well, the security data by default is
contained in the file

C:\Windows\security\database\secedit.sdb

so if any of your recent backups contain that file and you manage to extract
it, you could potentially use a similar secedit command to reconfigure your
computer with that older security database.

Not tested, but it may be worth a try.