Help! I am in XP Hell!

Factual Questions
1

Man, I think I just hosed my whole system. The MS website is no help, I haven’t made any progress in hours, so I’m turning to the REAL brains in the universe. Please get me out of this.

Background: I’ve been fighting a DVD playback problem for over a month and a half now. I bought a $250 ATI AIW Radeon 8500 graphics card to replace my old AIW 128. The 128 played DVD flawlessly, the pricey new one played it with hangups about every 10 secs. I’ve been thru hell with ATI tech support, they have given up.

So, tonite, in my brilliance, I decided to try a quick windows reinstall to see if that would help. Under previous windows OS’s, this sometimes cleared stuff up. I had never actually re-installed XP before, but the original conversion from Windows ME was so easy and painless, I figured it would be a snap.

The first thing it did was flip to a blue text screen and ask me if I wanted to convert to the NTFS file system. It looked cool. I went for it. Then it said something about it might have to delete my c:\windows folder. No big deal, it’s just going to replace it with a new one. I guess in my mind I heard “overwrite” instead of “erase”.

stop laughing.

OK, so after it installed, it boots to a fresh windows desktop with nothing but a recycle bin. Everything is gone. The files are still there, but the installation info is gone, so windows won’t see it. This wouldn’t be life threatening except for a) it got my outlook express e-mail info, so all my e-mails are either gone or inaccessable, b) some software I don’t have the disks to is most certainly screwed.

My question to you gouys is:

A) I can see my old user profile files there, but can’t get it to see them and let me log on as that guy anymore. Is there any way to do this? It’s an account from a previous XP install, why doesn’t it see it?

b) When I type in some of the subfolder names I had in Outlook express into the search function, it finds references to that e-mail subfolder. Is there any way to get OE to import my old e-mails the way I’ve done in previous conversions? Are they gone?

Any help would be appreciated.

2

You should find both your old desktop and your old ‘my documents’ folder in
c:\documents and settings(old logon name)…, you can copy all the data in these folders to your c:documents and settings (new logon name)…

To find your old outlook express stuff, search for *.mbx and you should find both your old and new data stores for outlook express, I believe you can now import the old store into the new one. I use outlook not outlook express, so i’m not 100% sure on this one. It used to work that way.

BTW, does your DVD work now?

3

Yeah, actually it DID fix the DVD problem. So now I can watch movies again, but everything else is hosed. Don’t you just love these things?

Thanks for the tips, I’m gonna go try them now. 'Preciate it dude!

4

Bummer, no .mbx files found.

5

Look for .pst and .dbx.

6

looks like the OE path is:

C:\Documents and Settings(user name)\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities{12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789123}\Microsoft\Outlook Express

the long string might be different from what’s here.

and as desmos says, it appears to be a .dbx file.

7

Was your old file system fat32 before? did you convert or format with ntfs?

8

It was fat32, and I converted at the beginning of the XP re-install (2nd XP installation)