In what directory are files on the desktop stored?

[Neil]

A friend has asked me to help him recover a Windows 7 system that will no longer boot into Windows. We've tried half a dozen restore points, and recovery has failed. Before I go further and try to either do an upgrade/repair install, or a restore to factory state, I'm backing up his files using a Linux LiveCD, and have already saved the "Users" directory, and a few others, but he tells me there were several files that he had scattered around his desktop that he would like to save, and I'm not sure just where those would be stored. Whenever I've had to do something similar on one of my machines, I knew exactly which directories all my files were in, because I don't leave things on the desktop.

Can anyone help me find and save those files?

Edit: I'll have to wait until I get home to check this, but I think I found my answer. There is a desktop sub-directory of each user directory. So, maybe that's what I'm looking for.

[twistero]

Files that are put on the desktop by the user are most likely in %USERPROFILE%\Desktop, as you have found out. Some desktop icons that are available to all users may be in %PUBLIC%\Desktop.

(%USERPROFILE% = C:\Users\[username] and %PUBLIC% = C:\Users\Public, in case you're not familiar with Windows environment variables.)