Windows Vista – Restoring Missing Downloads Folder

windows-explorerwindows-vista

I originally had the Downloads folder in my user profile redirected to a folder on a hard drive which went bad. So I removed the hard drive, but now the Downloads folder is gone altogether. How do I restore this folder and point it back to my original C: drive?

Note: Googling for this revealed nothing useful. I found some links that suggested typing "shell:downloads" in the Start prompt, but that doesn't do anything for me.

Best Answer

See this article : How to Restore a Missing Personal User Folder in Vista.

Go through all the steps described in the above article, although I expect that the one you're looking for is Option three sub-option 4. This requires that the Download directory exist in its customary place : C:\Users\$user-name$\Downloads .

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Windows Vista System Restore – Fix Error 0x490

Well, it turns out that they had everything backed up with Carbonite, so I decided to take the easy way out and just reimage with a clean version of Vista.

Like I put in the edits, the Microsoft solution didn't work, so I think it was a corrupted kernel patch.
(There was no warning that this would happen, they just woke up and their computer was dead)

Windows – Favorites disappeared in windows 8

Ordinarily, Restore favorite links should have worked; that's what it's there for. I just deleted the Links folder in Win7, then used that same option to regenerate them so Favorites was restored back to default.

At this point IMO you have two options:

Create a new temporary user profile (or use an existing separate profile) and copy a working Links folder over to your profile. Naturally, custom items you previously added will not be restored.
Since Links is just an ordinary folder with a hidden+system Dekstop.ini that's responsible for the magic, you could simply create a new folder by that name and copy over/recreate Dekstop.ini from a working instance of the folder (from a different profile on your or another PC). This is what it looks like on Win7, not sure if it's the same on WIn8 as I don't have access to it right now:
```
[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21810
[LocalizedFileNames]
RecentPlaces.lnk=@shell32.dll,-37217
Desktop.lnk=@shell32.dll,-21769
Downloads.lnk=@shell32.dll,-21798
```

After doing either of these Restore favorite links should work (if not, reboot and try again).

Best Answer

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