I’m on my third complete reinstall of Windows on my Inspiron 530n. Completely erased the hard drive, reinstalled Windows from scratch… and the same problem keeps happening.
Worse, my Inspiron 530n is plugged into my HDTV… making troubleshooting a royal pain.
Here’s the problem. With Vista SP1, this computer keeps corrupting my user account. This is the third time it’s happened, on a third reinstall of Windows. Eerily, the first two time it was the identical problem. This time it’s a new spin on the same problem.
The first two times, my user account would refuse to load. Windows would then create a temp account, with the annoying “Your user account could not be loaded” error. I would proceed to run chkdsk, and each time, it would find the error and fix it. Reboot, and back to my account. The problem? The next time I turn on my PC from a cold boot, the same error would arise, requiring the same fix. After about 30 times, this gets really frustrating…
Third reinstall. This time, my PC now thinks my account is a Guest account. No, not the Guest account, a generic guest-privileges account. And, since I’m now a guest… I can’t access administrative tools to do anything. Can’t run chkdsk, can’t run User Accounts… nada.
The one thing in common with all these errors? They all started after power was cut to the PC abruptly. Once was because of a power outage, and the other two were due to a particular idiot switching off the power strip (that would be me).
What it does point to, is serious problems with Vista SP1’s journaled NTFS file system. I really hope Microsoft takes a good look at file systems with Windows 7… I’m afraid that’s something for which they may overlook while working on the many things that need to be fixed, in order to woo over the XP crowd.