Windows 7: Cannot start User Profile Manager

OK. I screwed up.

I have a laptop with an SSD + a HDD. When I installed it, I installed to C: (SSD) but set up Users and PRogramData to be in the D drive.

This morning, the connector on the HDD slipped and I booted it with out the D drive connected.

Note: Evidently I turned off System Retstore at some point (probably to perform a large installation) and then forgot to turn it back on.

So now when I log in, none of my user profiles are available.



Any idea how to rest this?

How and what settings did you change to point user folders on your D drive?.

Did you do it via the registry?.
I wonder if OS is assigning a different letter to the "D" drive, and now windows can not "find the path of the user folders"

Can you go in safe mode?.

I did it at installation using Audit mode; See this for instructions.

Basically, when you first boot into windows at install, but before it has started installing the User/PD folders, you can use Audit mode to change their location from day1. So this is an "offical" way to do it.

I have never had a problem with this- EXCEPT if the system boots from C with the D (or whatever) drive missing. Windows is HORRIBLY non-tolerant of this. And the truth is, occasionally this happens (In my case, my dual-drive laptop screws got loose, and the second drive popped out of the connector).

In the past, all I had to do was run System Restore; which I usually have set up to run weekly. But I turned it off to do some big install script (that was triggering way too may restore points), and forgot to turn in back on.

I suspect windows resets some registry entries back to C: when things don't work out; not sure how I can figure out what.

Just to check if I have understood you correctly:

Reconnecting the secondary disk does not help? I mean I can understand you cannot login to your profile if the drive containing profiles is missing, but what happens if you shut down the PC, reconnect the drive and reboot?

Yeah- that's the problem.

When you boot without the drive (or possibly, when you attempt to log in without the drive), windows screws something up, so that when you plug the drive back in you are hosed.

Right now (with the drive back in) I can only log in under the "default user account" which is a new Administrator account that was not on the system previously. And a lot of stuff doesn't work- I get the Profile manager error (no Start menu, etc). So I suspect that it's running this account off of C, but still referencing D, and not seeing it.

System restore would fix this but as you do not have restore points it's not a solution for you. If you have no system image or backup to restore, the only thing to do is to to reinstall.

Before reinstalling you could try SFC /SCANNOW, and after that boot to Safe Mode, then reboot normally.

kari

Ha. Thanks for making me think about it.

So the thing that threw me for a loop is that Windows does not list ANY of my login accounts on the login page now; even ones that I did not log in with. I tried my main account and the Administrator account, both failed to log in.

But then I found this KB article, and used Method 1 to set the state on my account (in the registry) back to 0x0 (from 0x8000 or something).

When I rebooted, it still didn't show the users, but I was able to specify my name in the text box and log in.

Seems to be working for my account, although the Administrator account is not working. Maybe the wires on that one got crossed?

I'll create a new "admin" account so I have the redundancy, and try to figure out why the other accounts are not listing.

Thankfully, it doesn't look like I need to reinstall. But something is up with the Administrator account, and possibly others.

I would run SFC /SCANNOW as many times as needed, booting after every pass.

Good idea; I will run the utility.

Interesting update;

I only fixed my personal account (I'm an admin). I had enabled the built-in admin account, and I am supposing that it was hosed too, because when I try and run an app as that Admin (UAC password prompts), I get weird error messages ("can't find the setup.exe you just clicked"). After some annoying running around, I used my aco**** on the UAC prompt and it worked. So it seems I need to fix that account too.