XP Documents and Settings folder missing

Hey, I've got a computer that I'm working on for a friend. They got the missing hal.dll error. Tried restoring the file but didn't work. Anyway, before doing a restore I'm trying to back up their documents. I've got their laptop drive as a slave in my computer. I can see everything but "Documents and Settings". I have check the "show hidden files and folders" box but it's still not there. They were running XP but not sure what SP. I'm running XP SP3. They had a password on their user account.

How can I get to their Documents and Settings folder so I can backup all their stuff?

Thanks for the help.

Paul

 

By the way, here's a screenshot of the file structure.

 

have you tried booting into safe mode to try to view the files mate?

or - second side, have you tried using the hard drive in the original computer - and simply using a bootable password cracking program that helps you gain access to a forgotten computer, to see if there stuffs actually .. ya know - there.

 

Yes, can't get into safe mode. I think it's missing the boot.ini file. I ran chkdsk on it from my other desktop and it found a lot of errors in the index that it corrected.

 

Do they have more than one partition on that laptop?
Besides the Documents and settings missing they don't have a boot.ini. The boot.ini could be on a different partition. I didn't think it was possible but could the D&S folder be on a different partition?

 

No, I checked there aren't any partitions on this drive.

 

I googled Documents and Settings folder missing and couldn't find many hits and no solutions.

Maybe try and put a generic boot.ini and see what happens if you try and boot on the original machine. I'm wondering if you could get into Safe Mode if a System Restore would be an option to find the D&S folder?

 

Yeah, I couldn't find anything either. I did add the generic boot.ini file and that didn't help. I've tried safe mode, regular mode. I used a Knoppix CD and booted from the CD and still didn't see the Documents and Settings folder. I've booted up to ERD Commander 2007 and performed "Reset Permissions" on the whole C drive, I did a scan/repair of system files, I did a ERD System Restore of just the last action and none of those got me any further. On the scan/repair it did fix 3 files one of which was just a help file, the other two didn't look like anything major.

I just can't understand why I can't see the Documents and Settings folder. I have fixed many computers and have never had one to stump me like this one.

Again, thanks for the help and all your responses.

Paul

 

Well, I finally found it. One of the things I did during all this is run a chkdsk. When I did it found index errors. I had seen the folders found.000 and found.001 but I've never seen anything useful in those folders before. Well guess what? All of the stuff that is normally in Documents and Settings was under that folder. I would have never thought it would be there. I discovered this by adding Folder Size from Sourceforge so I could see the sizes of folders.

Thanks to everyone that took the time to help me.