Upgrade from Vista Business to Vista Ultimate DELETES User Directo

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ralf Ziller
  • Start date Start date
R

Ralf Ziller

I did an upgrade from Vista Business to Vista Ultimate using a Full installer
CD. I chose the option to upgrade and KEEP all programs and documents.
The install ended with all programs still there but it completely deleted
the userfolder for the currently logged in user and replaced it with a fresh
user folder named username.000. All other user files are still there
everything that was saved on disc is still there except this one User
directory (which had all the files that count).
And I thought the worse case for this upgrade was Vista not booting
(although I thought that highly impropable because it's an upgrade to more
features and not another OS). I would have never thought about Vista
shredding my files. Now I have to go back to an old backup because the recent
backups didn't even work.
I am really quite pissed with MS and wished I never made the decission to
develop on this platform. If only I'd taken the opportunity to program
numerical models in Fortran 2 years ago...
Why does Vista maliciously delete user files? MS really should force a
backup prior to any upgrade. So that users naively thinking such a thing
cannot happen can't be so stupid.

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http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/co...osoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup
 
Hi Ralf,

That's (obviously) not normal. In an upgrade scenario the user account
should be preserved. Just speculation, but for the upgrade to have replaced
a user account with a fresh one, it must have detected some amount of
corruption in ntuser.dat that prevented importing it into the new
installation (Vista does not simply overwrite files during this process as
was done in previous versions of Windows, it creates a new install and
imports files, settings, etc from the old install).

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
Hello Rick,

after spending the whole morning removing the harddisc, putting it into
another machine and hunting for deleted files with a recovery tool I found
out by accident that Windows creates a folder named $inplace.~tr where it
puts all files it decided to discard during an update. So if anyone else ever
runs into a problem like that this is the place to look for your files. It's
propably created during the process you describe.
Would have been nice if the guy from MS support could have told me about
that this morning.
But right now I am more relieved about finding those files than be angry
about the unnecessary work (which admitedly is a big part my own fault).
 
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