[RESOLVED] Vista - user account did not load properly

[wossname]

My Dad's account failed to load properly today. It booted to some sort of default account instead. I tried again and the same thing happened.

A message bubble appears saying it hasn't loaded correctly. None of his documents were visible in the Documents folder. It's clearly not even attempted to log in as his user. Not even his wallpaper appeared. It mentions a log file but gives no means for me to access it.

I have taken no action to fix this yet, I am hoping that there is a very simple way to rectify this. I don't want to have to recreate the user account (which will take ages due to user settings and so forth).

Can anyone shed some light on this? I'm not a vista user usually, so I'm not familiar with the means of fixing such things.

[JuggaloBrotha]

I've had that happen to me on WinXP comps a couple of times, what ya gotta do is schedule a ChkDisk for the entire drive, then restart the comp, let it run and login normally when it's finished.

Somehow the profile data can't be read right now and if this happens a few times in a short amount of time it's a good sign the drive's going bad.

[Nightwalker83]

Try doing a repair! You can repair Vista by re-installing important files that may have been lost or deleted.

[Siddharth Rout]

It booted to some sort of default account instead.

Hi Wossy.

Can you describe this account?
What all can you access in this account?
Do you get any black screen?
Do you have an administrator account also in Vista?

[JuggaloBrotha]

Try doing a repair! You can repair Vista by re-installing important files that may have been lost or deleted.

It's not the OS files that cant be read, it's the Profile files, of which a repair wont be of any use.

What's happened is that part of the profile got saved to a corrupt spot on the disc platter and a ChkDisk (Scandisk) will find those, try to get the data out, mark that spot as unwritable in the partition table and next time he logs in the the lost parts of the profile will be re-created and saved. If it happens a few times in a short amount of time (like 3 times in 2 months) it's time to consider ghosting the drive and replacing the HDD altogether.

[wossname]

Thanks for the advice guys, I'll try this tonight. I do hope it's not the HDD going kaputt because this laptop's less than 3 years old!

Can you describe this account? Nothing special, just used for word processing and email.
What all can you access in this account? No personal files at all, otherwise it's just like a new user account.
Do you get any black screen? Nope, visually everything is normal apart from personalisations, which are all back to defaults.
Do you have an administrator account also in Vista? Yes.

Anyway, I'll post back here with my results.

Thanks guys!

[Siddharth Rout]

Do you have an administrator account also in Vista? Yes.

log on thru the Admin account. Can you see your dad's profile?

Edit: Just got home so logged on to Vista to check what else could be a problem...
If you can see your Dad's profile, check if it is not turned off. That could also be a reason for it not showing up...

[wossname]

Running Chkdsk seems to have fixed the problem for now! Thanks very much for the help.