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I stumbled upon a Windows XP drive that needed repairing a while back, and after months of troubleshooting, I got it working. I created a fresh install and then manually placed in each folder from the broken installation, which took a couple of days to accomplish.

However, two problems have arisen:

#1: My XP installation does not boot unless I use an external USB. Both of the boot.ini files point to the same partition and I tried replacing the rest of the boot files, but nothing works.

#2: When I got in using the USB, my User folder from the donor installation was still there. So I thought, "No biggie! I'll just delete it and it'll load into the other profile." The thing is, it instead RE-CREATED it, which I didn't even know was possible. Can anyone explain to me how to fix this?

Here's a simplified explanation:

User A and B are present.

OWNER wants to load into User B and nothing else.

OWNER deletes User A.

OS revives User A and refuses to recognize User B.

Can anyone help me with these problems? Thanks!

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  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList Store the location of ALL user profiles. You need to delete it from here first otherwise it will be recreated.
    – cybernard
    Feb 9, 2021 at 14:38
  • @cybernard I tried editing/delete all I could, yet it never changed. The registry key was being recreated too. Perhaps there's another registry key?
    – IMSOASIAN
    Feb 11, 2021 at 13:58

1 Answer 1

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I did a sort of Frankenstein treatment, but I think I fixed it!

I first deleted mentions of User A in the registry like @cybernard mentioned. Then, deleted the My Documents folder of User A. Next, then redirected the other registry keys for User A to User B. Finally, I changed the name of User A to User B.

It pretty much-synced everything over and is practically a man-made version of User B.

I'm still fixing the boot issues, but it seems to be the cause of a miswritten boot.ini or something.

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