Vista Woes?
Just yesterday or so, a fren, A, came and asked for help as she had some problem with her Vista (Business) laptop. She was unable to access her administrator profile but able to access the guest account.
She then showed us (me and Y) the message which is somewhat similar to user profile unable to load.
Y suggested that to boot into the safe mode using F8 and worked it from there. So we boot the lappy into safe mode, and we go straight to the event log. The event log basically logged whatever problems (especially error) that Vista encountered. From there we could get a glimpse of what actually happened in the process and why she was unable to load her administrator profile.
Investigation!
A quick googling around, one of the fixes is to edit the registry settings without reformatting:
In short, you go to regedit (Start --> Run --> "regedit") and edit from there:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
Surprised???
When we delved into the profile list in the registry, I was in for a little surprised!
In her computer profiles, there are a couple of profiles with different SIDs! Three of them are from the system.1 is her original administrator account, 1 guest account and another don’t know what account. Okay, this seems to be confusing! But it wasn't.
Let us analyzed below:
Her original administrator account has been renamed with a .bak extension and her guest account has been "promoted" to the administrator status. Well, the last three digits of the SID ended with 5xx. That seemed impossible right? The administrator account is therefore is visible (to us) but Vista will not allow you to load when the account is selected.
Okay, what's next?
Most important thing is that did she backup her data? If she did, then it would be easier to fix the system. Y asked her if she had any thumb drive or portable hard disk with her. She did not had and a while, she came back with her portable hard disk, and a simple transfer of files are done and it was time to "hack" or "fix" her system via registry modification as mentioned earlier. (Evil grin... hehe)
Fix it
Unrename the .bak and allow the administrator account to be reinstated
Oh, btw, you will not be allowed to change the ".bak" extension to original (no .bak attached at the end) if your SID of both original account and other account are the same. Just see and compared the SIDs(numbers)!
If you goggled around, there are other fixes:
"There was 1 line for each profile. Crucially if a profile is bad there are 3 things worth checking
a) Ensure the key name doesn't end in ".bad"
b) Ensure the RefCount value is 0
c) Ensure the State value is 0"
Test it!
A simple renaming is done and rebooted the system. The laptop screen loaded and she selected the administrator account and she is able to load her original administrator account successfully! (Yay!)
-Special Thanks to Y for info and her help!
- wong chee tat :)
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