User accounts completely gone from Welcome Screen
Hello, all.
I've been running Windows 8 with no real issues for several months now, until today.
I was using my PC this evening when the notification that the computer was about to restart popped up, this is no big deal, so I saved all of my work and let the machine restart. When it booted back up, I noticed that my personalized lock screen photo was gone, replaced by the default "Windows Blue" colour, and upon removing that screen, I found that my user account was gone (I only have one account on my PC, so in effect, they were all gone); all that was there was the personalized colour I chose and the accessibility and shutdown options.
I have tried everything I could think of and just about everything I could find on the internet (it seems like this has happened on Windows OS's since XP, and the one thing I found on 8 was for prerelease and wasn't helpful): ctrl-alt-del on the login screen to make the admin account appear, system restore (of which, due to my poor foresight, there are only two points from the past two weeks, none of which seem to actually restore [sysrestore just goes from "preparing to restore..." to kicking me back to the recovery options with seemingly no change]), attempting to enable the admin account from the command prompt as well as regedit, booting into safe mode (all versions of which yield the same blank welcome screen), enabling my account from the command prompt as well with no joy (in fact, typing "net user" doesn't return my account name and has errors), and a few other things.
It's so baffling to me, because I can see that the entire file system is intact and everything is there, I just can't access it at all, even though I have to log in through my account to access the recovery tools (command prompt, system restore, et al) and that works just fine. Also, it seems like any registry changes I make aren't there after I reboot the PC.
Worse comes to worst, I can probably transfer everything over to an external through the Load Hive prompt in regedit or something, but I would love to not have to do that.
Sorry for the long-winded post; any ideas?
Hello, all.
I've been running Windows 8 with no real issues for several months now, until today.
I was using my PC this evening when the notification that the computer was about to restart popped up, this is no big deal, so I saved all of my work and let the machine restart. When it booted back up, I noticed that my personalized lock screen photo was gone, replaced by the default "Windows Blue" colour, and upon removing that screen, I found that my user account was gone (I only have one account on my PC, so in effect, they were all gone); all that was there was the personalized colour I chose and the accessibility and shutdown options.
I have tried everything I could think of and just about everything I could find on the internet (it seems like this has happened on Windows OS's since XP, and the one thing I found on 8 was for prerelease and wasn't helpful): ctrl-alt-del on the login screen to make the admin account appear, system restore (of which, due to my poor foresight, there are only two points from the past two weeks, none of which seem to actually restore [sysrestore just goes from "preparing to restore..." to kicking me back to the recovery options with seemingly no change]), attempting to enable the admin account from the command prompt as well as regedit, booting into safe mode (all versions of which yield the same blank welcome screen), enabling my account from the command prompt as well with no joy (in fact, typing "net user" doesn't return my account name and has errors), and a few other things.
It's so baffling to me, because I can see that the entire file system is intact and everything is there, I just can't access it at all, even though I have to log in through my account to access the recovery tools (command prompt, system restore, et al) and that works just fine. Also, it seems like any registry changes I make aren't there after I reboot the PC.
Worse comes to worst, I can probably transfer everything over to an external through the Load Hive prompt in regedit or something, but I would love to not have to do that.
Sorry for the long-winded post; any ideas?
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My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 8