Critical Error - Need help.

[~*Logan*~]

I manually restarted my computer since it froze up. After restarting, my desktop is completely different and everything is gone. I get a "critical error" message.

In the alert bubble, I get this message:

SLI multi-GPU rendering has been changed to independent GPU rendering because one of your SLI cards has been removed. SLI multi-GPU rendering requires 2 or more graphics cards.

I go to "explore" mode and I find that my desktop is now the desktop under "All Users." The desktop with all of my stuff on it is under the "<My Name>" folder in the C drive. (My name is what I registered the computer under, which is my first and last name).

So everything is still on my computer. It's just my computer is no longer displaying it. I even tried opening Firefox and it acted as if I had just installed it.

I open my computer itself and check to see why the error says a card has been removed, but everything is as it was. I even checked my display properties and the computer is still running under my GForce 6600GT.

I need to figure out how to restore everything back to how it was. How can I return everything to how it was before this mess happened?

 

[Tsunami]

well, if you have system restore turned on, use it. It may fix your problem.

 

[DiebytheSword]

You may have to do system repair. If you have your win xp disk, pop it in before boot and go through the motions of installing the OS from scratch. Don't use the recovery console unless you know what you're doing with it. When you get to the part about selecting your partition, there should be an option to REPAIR a windows installation already on the drive. Select this option, and be prepared to start reinstalling every win xp update you've had since you bought the disk, including service packs.

 

[|Overlord|]

Repair should be a last resort.

Are you running 6600GT SLI in your system?. Go to display properties > settings > advanced and try renabling SLI (if you are using it), or disable it if you don't have two gfx cards. If this does not work, remove the drivers then reinstall them to see if this solves the problem.

Another idea is to boot up into safe mode (pressing F8 before windows boot screen), and check the previleges of your normal account using the admin account that is usually only visible during safe mode and having a little fiddle with the user account settings.

As far as firefox is concerned, you can just shove all the stuff from your usual profile into the profile that is currently being used by copying the contents of the profile with your extensions/themes/cookies etc into the profile firefox currently uses. Information on this can be found here.

 

[DiebytheSword]

I said "may". If there is no other way to restore the lost account, he will have to resort to repairing the install of windows. It sounds like a bad system write back during power failure, generally this means that you must repair the installation.

 

[~*Logan*~]

Close this topic.

I went to my C Drive properties and tried the Error-Checking program to see if that could tell me what was wrong. Instead, it did a full system check and fixed all problems my computer had. Now, everything is back to the way it was PLUS a performance boost.