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A corrupt ntuser.dat file or profile permissions issue can trigger a temporary profile.

In my experience, unexpected power loss qnd bluescreens are the most common cause for these problems. Even Windows 7 was pretty good at keeping their system files consistent enough to be auto recovered.

I don't know yet. I'm currently creating a bit-copy of the disk using `dd`, and will start investigating the copy. So far, no disk errors.

Was going to make sure you did this. There is a high chance you will be able to get a lot of the files back.

You can use autopsy which is open source to carve for files. Or you might be able to use binwalk.

I got good results with photorec. Despit its name, it can recover other file types too. Beware: It takes ages, and finds absolutely everything, including e.g. the browser cache.