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I have two os's installed. My main and another one that is a fresh install. The main os's HD got corrupted but most of the files are intact(mainly boot stuff). I am trying to restore my google chrome profile.

I have copied the google chrome dir \Users\%User%\App Data\Local\Google to the working OS's drive and it didn't work. For some reason chrome was installed in program files. I then copied everything over to program files.

When chrome starts it loads up the bookmarks and passwords/login info it seems but no extensions or settings.

How can I get it to use the extensions I had and everything else. I haven't sync'ed to the cloud in a while so I'm trying to get the most recent changes.

Basically I think I have access to all the chrome data off the old hard drive so the problem is just getting chrome to use it on the new drive. Everywhere I've read says that all the data is under the Google dir but chrome doesn't seem to use it correctly.

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  • @Karan nope, one is general but mine is more specific. I can't get on the old os to do a proper backup and I've already copied over and it didn't work.
    – Archival
    Feb 28, 2013 at 1:24
  • Did you try copying just the User Data folder to a fresh install of Chrome?
    – Karan
    Feb 28, 2013 at 1:27
  • I was finally able to get it to work. It has to do with a difference between the user level and system level application install of chrome. Win7 uses user level and win8 was installed as a system level. The profile needed to be copied to the program files dir and not the user dir(or both). Eventually chrome opened with all the extensions running just like on win7. I do not know the exact solution but copying it eventually worked(I did remove some stuff from the registry and delete all chrome off the HD then redid it.
    – Archival
    Feb 28, 2013 at 1:54

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You had those two OS installed to begin with, right? As with the vast majority of people, I'm betting those two OS are not the same. Two different versions of Windows, I'm guessing.

Then it's reasonable to think that depending on the version, Chrome doesn't generate exactly the same profile files and content, or changes the location of a few files. Or it could be that some key files have gone missing or corrupted in the hard drive's failure. In both cases, IF the issue is resolvable, it sounds like you'd spend on the solution twice the time you'd have spent on reinstalling your newer things after a cloud sync. Besides, even in a perfectly normal situation, it seems that transferring Chrome settings with just files doesn't work 100 %. It might be a feature, so that people can't just access all of your passwords by copying a few files.

If you have the space, you could use one of those data recuperation programs to clone the whole broken drive to a partition, and then try those files. But this sounds like an elephant to kill an ant.

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  • But I can access the passwords and stuff. I just copied over and was already logged in. Just none of my extensions are working. It is win7 and win8 and while it is possible the locations are different I doubt it. I tried users and program files. There are programs that backup chrome profiles and can restore them supposedly and it probably would work fine if I could login on the old OS but I can't. I've been told all your data is in the google\chrome\user dir so all the stuff should be there. I see the extension in there too but chrome just won't use them.
    – Archival
    Feb 28, 2013 at 1:24
  • Perhaps some things are set - written - differently on each OS version, and the same file can't work on both. Or maybe it's a restriction they themselves put.
    – Ariane
    Feb 28, 2013 at 4:16

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