Hello all,

Recently, I had a drive crash. But I had everything backed up, right?

Problem is, the drive that crashed was my D:\ drive. Because I'm a grouch, I'd taken great pains to move XP's usual "C:\Documents and Settings\..." to "D:\users\..." in the proper manner (i.e. so XP knows). As well, any relevant "My Documents" folders were pointed to directories right off the root, like "d:\tom\..."

Note I like short paths and keeping oft-changing user data off the main drive where the operating system and apps are kept. May be pointless, but that's me!

Anyway, question is: when I pop a new d: drive in there, how can I repair the XP install so that the user hive is back where it belongs. Note the machine still boots now with defaults.

Much thanks to any who can enlghten this dangerous man...

About all you can do is go through the motions again to change the drive pathes to what they were so as to match the back up files or as long as the folders kept the same names then you could possibly drag and drop to exchange the back up files.

The next time you back up....look into ghosting a drive/partitions. That way when you restore the image(ghost) then everything will be back as it was to when you did the backup....including all the changed pathes and new files that you created....

Methinks you misunderstood the smilie! I had no backup, so when I bring the machine back, it will be with a blank D: drive; no user profiles, no nuthin' except Windows XP on the C: drive that is scratching it's head wondering where the user profiles on D: went.

See what I'd done was the equivalent of a clean install as in KB314843 where you would, if doing it unattended, install it this way:

Winnt.exe /unattend

and in the Unattend.txt file, I'd have had this:

[GiuUnattended]
ProfilesDir = d:\users

But I had to do it the hard way since XP was already installed.

So I'm wondering when I boot the machine with a new D: drive, what I'll have to do to get back to where I was - assuming I'll be able to format & patrition the drive with XP in it's "default" state.

I know I'll have to set up the accounts again once I get the profiles directory back where it belongs...

I think that you messed up if you reformatted the "D" drive(partition). Had you just did "C" drive then all your files and stuff would still be in place but unaccesable till the pathes were changed back in the "C" drive.... In the reinstall everything would be as new on the "C" drive and to get the users and profiles you just need to recreate them and relink them back to the old "D" partition!