XP totally wiped out

[trackrat]

Can anyone give me a clue to this problem.

I was on e-bay and everything locked up ( no keyboard or mouse ) so I pressed the reset button and checkdisk came up, in process 2 it deleted a file associated with $130 Documen~1.

When it had finished it rebooted and said it had to reset my personal preferences after doing that all my programs had gone, so I thought do a system restore, the only problem was when I clicked on accessories to go to system tools there was nothing in accessories it was completley empty.

At the moment I am doing an Acronis restore.

Can anyone suggest what would totally wipe out windows.

[trackrat]

A big thank you to POPS, I have restored from Acronis and I am up and running again.

Still it would be nice to solve the mystery.

[cozofdeath]

Humm thats weird. Never heard of this till I did a search but apparently its happened to quite a few others. Here is a manual solution and here is a more automatic one. As for why it happened I'm not sure, but I can't see how a file association would mess it up. What is that file ($130 Documen~1)? And why is there no extension on it? Anyway microsoft made a kb page for it but they don't really give a in depth answer as to why it happens.

[trackrat]

Thanks for that cozofdeath, I think I have traced the problem to my Iomega floppy drive / card reader, as it has been playing up just lately.

Sometimes I have to reboot to get the computer to recognise it, so I have disconnected it and will see what happens.