Windows 7: User accounts not recreated on clean install

Please can anyone help with the difficulty I'm having in recreating my 4 user accounts on a clean install of Windows 7?

I did a clean install (custom installation) to upgrade from Windows Vista Home Premium x32 to Windows 7 Home Premium x32. I used Windows Easy Transfer to save files and settings for the 4 user accounts (1 x administrator and 3 x standard) to an external hard disk and, following a successful clean install, I used it again to transfer them back to the PC. The Windows Easy Transfer Report says that the 4 users have transferred successfully and, sure enough, at "c:\users" there are four folders with the names of the 4 users concerned plus a 5th called "Public".

However, when I boot up the only account that appears on the login screen (if that's what it's called) is my (administrator) account. The other 3 standard accounts don't appear.

I went into Control Panel > User Accounts and Family Safety > User Accounts > Manage Accounts and created a new user account for the 1st of the 3 standard accounts (let's call it "Jane") thinking it would map the folder "c:users\Jane" to this user - but it didn't! Instead it created a new folder "c:users\Jane.pcname".

Please help? Should I continue with creating new user accounts for the other standard users in the way I did for "Jane" and then manually move the files across (e.g. from "c:\users\Jane" to "c:users\Jane.pcname") or will this make a mess of things? Is there another way? I didn't see anything in either the Windows 7 install wizard or the Windows Easy Transfer wizard that prompted me to create user accounts other than the one main administrator account.

Thanks for reading this post and I hope you can help!

Did you TICK all the box, in Step Two Transfer Files to New Computer Step 5, in this tutorial:
Windows Easy Transfer - Transfer To & From Computers


Recovery WET IMG
How to extract files from MIG

Theog, thank you. Yes I did tick all the boxes in STEP TWO, paragraph 5 of that tutorial. There were 5 boxes in all, i.e. the 4 individual users plus Shared Items.

Windows Easy Transfer says that the users were successfully transferred. The documents have certainly transferred across into separate folders named after each user and one called Public (for the shared items), but separate user accounts have not been created.

Any ideas?

Don't bet on this but I would guess that the easy transfer doesn't actually do that. I think all it does is store the information on the C drive, perhaps in a file called windows.old, but I could be mistaken. Think you have to make your own new user accounts, find the files, and restore them to their proper locations

This is why many of us don't recommend using WET as it's easier to just drag each User account to external, then copy the files into a clean reinstall. Plus WET can copy in AppData settings which are a corruption path into a fresh clean install.

What I would do is set up your accounts in User Accounts, then copy the data from the imported User folders into the new User folders. I would not replace the new folders with the imported ones unless they are also shown to be shell folders with the correct insignia on each, as I'm not sure WET copies shell folder links intact.

Example of shell folder insignia:

Thank you all for your help. I went back through the WET process and I think that when I came to the "Choose what to transfer to this computer" step I clicked on Advanced Options in the bottom RH corner which takes you to the "Map user accounts" screen. I think I then clicked the drop down menu and created new user accounts in the same name as the old.

My recollection is a bit hazy (well, it was about 2.30 am at the time!), but I suspect that in doing so I must have told Windows simply to transfer the documents into folders bearing the names of the users instead of letting Windows set up the user accounts itself and transferring all the files and settings itself!

I've deleted the user folders that were created and run WET again, this time not mapping user accounts, and it has worked, including all e-mail settings. Hooray!

There are still a few minor glitches with the names of the user folders, namely that where a couple of the user names were renamed in Vista a couple of years ago, the old user folder names have carried over to the new set up, which is a bit frustrating. I guess I could do as gregrocker and DustSailor suggest (and as has been suggested elsewhere) and set up new user accounts and copy the data over. But how would I copy over the email/contacts/calendar data? I can't see it in the user folder, unless of course they're hidden files. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Most of those settings are in hidden User Appdata folders which you can unhide at Control Panel>View.

To find out exactly where each program's data/address book/mail etc is stored, Google it.

You can then copy in those folders manually if that's the way you want to try it.

Note that many mail programs require using their import feature to do this, although simply replacing the relevant folder may be enough.