Windows Vista Help with rebooting laptop

My daughter has an emachine laptop, and she wanted to unistall a programme and unistalled the e recovery management system by mistake. Now when she switches the computer on it shows the error message - user profile not loaded correctly, logged on with a temporary profile. Tried system restore and it won't complete this task.
I have been told that we need to boot it back to factory settings. We can't do this direct from the laptop as the recovery programme is no longer there. We have tried to use the recovery discs we made when laptop new but with no success. Have even set the bios to pick up cd rom first when computer switched on but nothing is happening.

Can anyone help me how to do this please. Or could the hard drive be damaged (laptop has been dropped as well)

Many thanks

 

Take the laptop off the daughter and never let her near it again! It makes me think about future homework excuses... "The dog ate my hard drive ".

Two places to look would be to read in the system manual about booting. There are three or four "CD drives" in my boot list, USB, SATA, IDE and the normal one, which should say it's make and model. I can also press F12 to bring up a boot list (but things can be included/excluded from it). I sometimes select the wrong type of CD drive. The other place to look is any FAQs at the eMachines website.

Watch the screens in case it says "Press any key to boot to CD ".

You talk about

that should not remove the hidden recovery partition on the HDD, you should be able to boot to it at startup. Again, you will need to read in the manual. (If you run the recovery system it will delete any data and take it back to factory condition.) If worse comes to worst, you should be able to purchase recovery CDs/DVDs from eMachines.

that is not bad (unless maybe, if it is the main administrator's user profile). You can go to C:\Users and find her "corrupt" user. Copy the data out of it to the new user's profile. Copy things inside the folders, like Favorites, Documents, Pictures, Music, etc (don't copy program files). You can and "personalise" (rename) the new user profile in Control Panel -> User Accounts.

It only seems that the old user profile got corrupted. If the new one works fine, just get the data from the old user profile. (It should be able to be deleted after your sure all the data is across). If it boots straight into the old user profile without logon, set a password for it, then you should get a logon screen.

Here you go...
Look up User Profiles in Help and Support. There is one "Fix a corrupted User Profile ", but it just looks like more detail on what I have said.

Matt
PS Run Error Checking (CHKDSK) on the hard drive. Be sure to run a scan of the disk's surface. It could take a long time, set it up to run overnight.