Windows 8 Crashed . What the hell is going on ????

ikillbears · 14 Nov 2013 at 17:01

My girlfriend was rebooting her laptop running windows 8. it crashed. Restarted and it remembers nothing. except her log in picture, her password. her wireless password. everything else is gone. and i mean everything, there are no apps. nothing. you cant access the ' my computer ' nothing. every time you restart it it just goes straight into the ' setting up your pc ' situation. what the hell is going on ? Shes really stressed out as had some important documents on it. Can any one help ????

linktoinsanity · 14 Nov 2013 at 17:05

It sounds like it has logged in with a temporary profile for whatever reason. Go into C:\Users and you should see her original username. Go into there and copy all the documents out of it onto an external drive, then use system restore. Please note: Only tried and tested as a working fix for Windows 7, however it DOES sound like a corrupted profile issue.

Raumarik · 14 Nov 2013 at 17:17

If it is just a corrupt profile the good news is that her stuff is probably all still in the c:\users\username folder unless she had lots of redirections/libraries setup.

ikillbears · 14 Nov 2013 at 17:18

cheers for the quick response. I have an update.

I hit an assist button that is on her laptop. It's a Sony Vaio. And.... it worked.... slighty.

Ive managed to back up all the files so thats the important thing.

Here's the weird thing. The overlay, i believe its called Metro ( im a mac boy ) doesn't work at all. it doesn't know there are any apps or anything like that. However, after i hit this assist key it launched a sony app which brought it to the original windows desktop that we all know and love. So it seems to me ( a complete novice / guess ) that the overlay has well and truely done one. Any one have any suggestions about how to fix that ?

I'll have a little look into the above ( thank you )

theheyes · 14 Nov 2013 at 17:40

Is it a new laptop or an old one that was upgraded to 8?

ikillbears · 14 Nov 2013 at 18:00

it was relatively new, 4 months at the most. fresh windows 8 install. I've just done a windows restore and it seems to be ok now. Was really really weird at first and didnt help when the girlfriend started crying.

with held the temptation to say, this is why you should always dropbox your work.

theheyes · 14 Nov 2013 at 18:38

With that sort of crash I always test the RAM and disk just to make sure there isn't an obvious hardware problem. It's been the precursor to many a disk failure in my experience.