Help I've borked the wifes windows box

[heiowge]

I've made a mistake.

My wife wanted some christmas tunes off my pc. I thought I'd transfer them over the network. It could see my pc, the folder with music, and the subfolder with christmas music. Even the music itself.

But would it copy it? No. So I looked online for a solution. One of the folders I needed to look at was hidden, so I ticked the "show hidden files/folders" thingy.

Then it spent 3 mins applying it to subfolders etc. I thought it was windows being slow. Now I find it's doing far more insidious things.

Users folder is missing. The show hidden option is missing. All her music and files are missing.

I booted into a copy of MINT MATE 32 bit that I had on a stick and there it is. Everything is exactly where it should be. I just can't see it in windows. So I'm backing it up to the external drive.

Without doing a full reinstall, any idea how to restore the status quo?

Ta

[Ram]

where did you get your info from.

Dumb question - have you tried starting it in safe mode ?

[heiowge]

youtube. And no.

[heiowge]

The nightmare continues...

I've got most of it back. For some reason, everthing was set as read only and hidden. And the "apply to sub folders and files" wasn't working that well!

Now it's firefox thats playing up. Windows says it's running and I need to close it down. Only it's not running. Not even a firefox process. Nothing. Even a reinstall of FF doesn't help. Grrr...

[Ram]

That probably from the options you've been play with... probably applies to FF too.

Locate FF in the user profile and check it permissions and viability.

[heiowge]

Yeah, I'm on that atm. Just waiting for the wife to finish playing her facebook games (using chrome).

[heiowge]

Done. I searched for %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ and then selected all and changed them to not being hidden. Problem solved.

Begs the question though... how much more damaged did windows do by me simply asking it to show me hidden folders?

I am so happy I don't use windoze.

[Ram]

It shouldn't have done anything, done it loads of times without issue.

I'd give it a good seeing to with malware / virus scanners.

[Dutch_Master]

Recommended: http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage