system32 missing, Completely bare desktop

Right. So by the recommendation of my local IT guy, I found out it was a corrupted account, and did the following:

1. Created two new accounts. One of them, I was going to eventually migrate into.
2. Log into the account that I'm NOT going to migrate into.
3. Go to Folder options to see all hidden files and OS files.
4. Copy stuff over from the old account to the new account EXCEPT the ntuser*** stuff.
5. Log on to the other account. Do stuff.

Apparently, that was the easiest way of doing stuff with the stuff I had on the spot.

If I was doing this proper, I should have had reinstalled the whole thing, but I really wasn't in the position to do that, as I needed the lappy in a hurry.

Hope this helps someone!

I faced the same issue. Nothing to worry. Just boot into safe mode(in case of win 8/8.1 press and hold shift and perform a restart. You will be booted into advanced menu select troubleshoot in submenu select adavced start option and select restart after restart press 5, you will be booted into safemode) there your computer will back to previous good config and perform normal restart. Everything works fine thereafter.

Above process helped me. Hope it will also help for u guys.

Similar situation: I booted up an old computer that was missing the drive that has this folder. I have no need to recover it, though this solution may work for recovery as well.

My fix involves the registry, so general caution is advised.

Open up the registry editor and navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Software / Microsoft / Windows / Explorer / Shell Folders

From there you can edit the value for Desktop, assigning a new location. I created a new desktop folder in C:/Users/me (me being my user name) and assigned this location.

Once done, open the task manager and kill/restart explorer.exe

Backup your Users folder to an external device/share before you do anything else. If it is in fact your hard drive failing, you will want to utilise as much time recovering any data as it could die at any time.

Once you have backed the data up. Try downloading Crystal Disk Info and run it on the drive. If it shows up healthy then I would re-install windows. If however it shows up anything other than a healthy drive I would acquire a new HDD and install windows on to that.