Restore User Accounts

[Guest]

I just installed a clean copy of windows. All prior user acounts are not
available although they apear to be fucntional within the "documents and
settings" folder. Is there anyway to recover or restore these older user
proilfes from the "documents and settings" folder, even theough they do not
appear active?

 

[Mikhail Zhilin]

"How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421

--
Mikhail Zhilin
http://www.aha.ru/~mwz
Sorry, no technical support by e-mail.
Please reply to the newsgroups only.
======

 

[Steve N.]

"How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421

Entirely different issue, doesn't apply.

Steve

 

[Steve N.]

I just installed a clean copy of windows. All prior user acounts are not
available although they apear to be fucntional within the "documents and
settings" folder. Is there anyway to recover or restore these older user
proilfes from the "documents and settings" folder, even theough they do not
appear active?

Try this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;811151

Be aware there is a step missing; you must login to the new user account
once before copying the old profile data, otherwise there will be no
destination folder to copy to.

Steve

 

[Guest]

A clean install would leave no reminance of the old OS and its files would it
not ?

 

[Gordon]

A clean install would leave no reminance of the old OS and its files would it
not ?

Not if it was done on another partition......

 

[Guest]

Touche, His post states though its on the same partition does it not. Same
files and same user files. Would it not be on the same partition then ?

 

[Steve N.]

Touche, His post states though its on the same partition does it not. Same
files and same user files. Would it not be on the same partition then ?

You're right but the OP didn't do what we call a clean install or the
old user directories wouldn't be there.

Steve

 

[Ramesh, MS-MVP]

Hi Steve,

That link does apply here as accessing old user profile folders might result
in error "Access Denied" (NTFS) after a reinstallation. Once done, the OP
can copy the user data to the new profile, as you said.