User Profile Issues with replacement hard drives

neoknight88 · 17 Mar 2015

My set up (just for a little background) is a desktop with
a single 120GB SSD which contains Windows 7 (C:\)
a failing 1TB Hitachi HDD which contains two partitions, D:\Program Files (where I manually install everything I don't want on the hard drive), and E:\Users (where the user profiles are kept to save some space on C:)
I just recently bought two 1TB Western Digital HDs so that I could separate my partitions, and hopefully eek out a little bit better performance.

Here lies the crux of the problem. I have successfully cloned the partitions to their respective drives, and now I want to boot Windows using the new drives. However, I made the somewhat moronic mistake of booting into Windows without the old drive being connected, which broke my user profiles. So, now I'm trying to correct this mistake.

I'm starting by trying to assign the proper drive letters to the new disks, but E is in use (I'm guessing so that I can get into the Administrative Tools, as I can't do this without the old drive being hooked up). I've had no problems assigning D:, but I won't be able to assign E because of a chicken/egg problem. If I change the assignment, I can reboot into Windows, but can't access computer management to assign the new drive E. If I leave it as is, I can't assign the new drive letter E.

What I'm thinking about doing is loading up a USB drive with a Windows 7 PE, boot to that, make my changes, then boot to the normal SSD. My only fear is that it will probably assign the drive letter to the PE and not the C: drive. Any advice or help would be appreciated.

neoknight88 · 17 Mar 2015

So, as it turns out, patience is not one my greater virtues. While waiting on a response (I waited 10 WHOLE MINUTES :)), I was googling. And I found a link on how to write a .bat to change a drive letter. Here's the link. I was able to use diskpart, following these directions, and reassign drive letter E to the correct drive. Now all I have to do is make sure that I can successfully login.

neoknight88 · 17 Mar 2015

Alright. Good news. I can successfully login. But, now, I have a username/password request rather than the friendly login list I'm used to seeing. When I try to change the login list back to the regular setting, it wants me to set my acct to automagically log in. I'd really rather not do that. Here's what I went to in order to bring up the setting for username/password. win+R (Run), then type in control userpasswords2. Here you can get it to turn off the username/password, but it's not fixing the listing. Will continue to troubleshoot.

comptech · 18 Mar 2015

You found the solution by yourself?

neoknight88 · 18 Mar 2015

Mostly. The only problem now is that it wants to have me enter a username and password for each time someone logs in, or it wants to auto logon my account. I don't want either of these options. I just want the normal welcome screen with both user accounts listed. Apparently, Microshaft doesn't think it's a setting that anyone wants.