Missing Desktop

[spickett]

Lord give me the strength not to choke someone.>:-<
I have a remote user who decided to run compress on her laptop to gain a little drive space. She thought the compress was locked up and so she shut the computer off during the process. It apparently continued to run to completion the next time she booted up.
Following the compression, she lost all desktop functionality. There are no toolbars, no icons, no start button. Basically nothing but the background graphic. The same thing occurs in safe mode.
The boot process appears to go normally to that point. If the laptop is connected to the network, it goes through the login process with no problem. You just can't do anything once you get to the desktop.
All of the backup copies of the registry are from after the compression, so I can't restore one of those.

Any ideas?

 

[crisc]

Sounds like some system files have been corrupted.
Boot from a Win98 startup disk and run scandisk. If it doesn't find any errors to fix, then reinstall Windows.

 

[spickett]

Good idea, but... Apparently Microsoft does not like to reinstall Windows on a compressed drive? At least that is the indication when I try to run setup from the CD.
Another thing that I just noticed on the last couple of reboots is that the ver last thing that appears is a message saying &quot;Creating User Profiles&quot;.
Don't know that I normally see that on most workstation boots.

 

[crisc]

Ugh, forgot you mentioned the compressed drive ;[

I think the &quot;creating user profile&quot; message is a dead end. I get it all the time on the PCs I support regardless of who logs in.

When you get to the desktop with no icons, does it totally lock up? Or do you have a mouse cursor and/or keyboard response? If it doesn't lock up, try doing a Ctrl Alt Del and see if anything is not responding or even listed for that matter...

 

[DrMaggie]

Sounds like you'll have to start from scratch with that one, reformatting the drive and all.

Is there some way to remove the harddrive and attach it to another computer - in that way, maybe the user's own data could be recovered?

DrMaggie ---------
&quot;Those who don't know the mistakes of the past won't be able to enjoy it when they make them again in the future.&quot;
— Leonard McCoy, MD (in Diane Duane's Doctor's Orders)

 

[spickett]

The system does not seem to be locked up once it gets to the desktop. I do have cursor movement, but I can't right-click on the desktop to get a popup.
Also something strange. If I hit capslock, nothing happens until I hit ctrl-alt-del, then capslock lights up and the Close Program dialog appears. The only item in the list is explorer.
Someone mentioned hooking this drive up to another computer to get the data off. I can't imagine, logistically, how I would do this, as it's 2.5&quot; laptop drive. I would imagine I would need some type of IDE adapter to hook it up as a secondary drive on a desktop system. I hate to expend this much time and effort on it, but I'm not certain how important the data is at this point.
Anyone know if the drive can be uncompressed from the command line? I'm wondering if I can get it uncompressed, if I could then re-install Windows!?

 

[crisc]

Do you know what compression utility she used? (Drivespace?)I stay far away from any compression utilities as a rule, and as such don't have much knowledge on how to &quot;undo&quot; them without access to the GUI.
Swapping out the HD on most notebooks is pretty easy--as long as you have another one of the same type and model handy. I don't think you can connect it to a standard IDE connector...
I agree with you, if you aren't too concerned with losing data I'd just fdisk and start over. Let it be a lesson to your user for messing with stuff she shouldn't...