[dubyayoung]

I have a desktop computer that started up with a wallpaper we hadn't used for a long time. I found out the date in Windows was 2006. Now the computer acts like it did a couple or years ago (not all the way back to 2006 though). Newer programs aren't there any more, icons on the desktop are old and newer ones we had are not there. Some peripherals won't work because drivers aren't there, etc. It is acting like it is using an old registry. I tried to reset it to a month ago with system restore, but there are no restore points available. I am hoping that my current information is still there somewhere, but I have no idea how to get to it. Any thoughts?

[dubyayoung]

I probably should add that (although I am not sure of the technical details of how it does it) this computer was configured with two hard 250gb drives in a RAID setup so as to have a back up drive in case one fails. What I am afraid of is that although it backs up the primary drive on the second one, if the first one is corrupt, the second will be an exact copy, so my so called backup is probably useless in this case. Just wanted to throw that out in case it mattered.

[Elvandil]

That's exactly why I don't recommend RAID-1 for backups. If one gets infected and unbootable, then so is the backup. It's a useless way to make backups. The only thing it protects you from is drive failure but none of the other things that can go wrong.

Since there can't be any registry in your system that is that old unless you explicitly saved a copy, it sounds most like the profile is corrupted. How many accounts are there and what are they?

[dubyayoung]

There is only one account, the computer boots right into Windows. I hope that is what you were asking!

[dubyayoung]

The RAID drives seemed like a good idea at the time as I had just had a drive fail on another computer and we lost some important data. Since then I have had a couple of issues that corrupted both drives, but so far no drive failures. Figures!

[dubyayoung]

So did you have any thoughts on what to do if an account is corrupted? Any helpful thoughts at all from anyone are appreciated.