PCTech Forums

Hi.... i'm new here; so here's the first question:
I reinstalled xp over an existing XP, because after loading the programs, the screen went black; no cursor. This because my friend turned off the settings of his Nvidia board to the tele. Same in safe mode.
Well after the reinstall, pretty much things were gone (another user), I mean the desktop shortcuts, programs in the program listing, data in another folder, etc...
Microsoft gives info on how not to have this problem before doing it, but says nothing about how to get things back to normal.

Has anybody any ideas?

thx in advance

It sounds like you did a full install instead of a Repair. If that is the case I believe the data is gone because the hard drive/partition would have been formated as a part of the install. To prevent losing your data you should do a Repair install.

yes, everything is there, but all the programs are out of the programs list, eg, ofiice; desktop shortcuts are gone, programs don't work any more etc.. Even after copying the data and desktop folder , i still had lots of trouble

You can't neccessarily expect all programs to work I'm afraid - it's a consequence of the fact that some programs put a lot of info in the registry & a lot of files in windows, both of which have now been overwritten. These programs will need to be reinstalled. As to your shortcuts and desktop items, some of these may have been in the 'all users' subdirectory. Unless this folder has been backed up or namechanged then you may have lost them