Problem after moving users folder on Windows 7

Question

I've just tried to move my users folder to another drive on 64-Bit Windows 7 Ultimate. However, I can no longer log in as I get the error message: "The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded".

In windows, my drives are mapped as:
C:\ -> windows system drive SSD
d:\ -> programs
e:\ -> users

Using the recovery command prompt my drives were mapped as:
X:\ -> recovery media
e:\ -> windows system drive SSD
f:\ -> users

I tried to create a hardlink from c:\users to e:\users in the recovery command prompt as follows:

robocopy /copyall /mir /xj e:\users f:\users
rmdir /S /Q e:\users
mklink /J e:\users f:\users

this seemed to work in the command prompt as doing a 'dir' showed the junction point as expected. However I was unable to log in after rebooting.

As I was slightly confused about which drive letters to use (the recovery ones or the original windows ones), I tried this again using the "\?\Volume{GUID}\" notation instead but this still has the same problem.

Anyone know what I did wrong or how to both this?

PS the original instructions I used were: http://lifehacker.com/5467758/move-the-users-directory-in-windows-7 PPS this is a clean install of windows, so I am not worried about losing data, etc.

Answer 1

See in this thread the comment made by ohdannyboy on December 4th, 2009 2:33 pm, and the following comment by imadman.

They detail how to relocate the Users folder in a way that supposedly works.

From wikipedia Robocopy :

The Windows Volume Shadow Copy service is the only Windows subsystem that can copy open files, which it does by snapshotting them for point-in-time consistency. Robocopy does not implement accessing the Volume Shadow Copy service in any way, inhibiting its usefulness as a backup utility for volumes that may be in use. However, one can use separate utilities such as VSHADOW or DISKSHADOW (included with Windows Server 2008) to create a shadow copy of a given volume with which to back up using Robocopy.

If uncopied in-use files are the cause of the problem, it is still unclear how you could have deleted e:\users, but many miracles are possible in Windows.

However, the article Backup/Copy Files that are "In Use" or "Locked" in Windows advocates using HoboCopy instead of robocopy.

As another remark, I cannot understand how you claim to have mapped the system drive to another letter than C:. As far as I know, this is absolutely impossible.