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Removing bad storage drive destroys libraries - DIFFICULT!
I am pretty good at Windows and have decades of experience. But this, is a super difficult issue that has me stumped for days. There is a lot to read, I am sorry, but the issue is: I cannot remove an old hard drive without destroying the media libraries for Media Center and Media Player.
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP-1
My Videos, My Pictures, My Music moved off Drive C to other mechanical storage drives, one is failing, and if I remove it, I lose my libraries for Media Player & Center.
I have several hard drives and have partitioned off the 1Tb drives to 4 smaller partitions, all for storage, a very long time ago. I wanted an SSD, moved my folder storage off drive C to other partitions on mechanical drives, then cloned drive C to a 500Gb SSD, and rebooted. I recreated the folders for all of the standard storage such as My Videos, My Pictures, My Music, and My Documents on other mechanical drives such as Drive E:\My Videos, etc.. This way I have little to no storage on Drive C which is now my SSD. This worked perfectly for over a year. I have 3 other mechanical drives.
Disk 3 - A 1TB drive partitioned to 4 logical drives; drives E, I, J, & K
Disk 0 - A 1TB drive partitioned to 4 logical drives; drives H, L, M, & N
Disk 2 - A 1TB drive partitioned to 2 logical drives; G, & O
Disk 1 - A 500Gb SSD drive which holds the system disk, drive C
Previously I had My Videos swapped to Drive E:\My Videos, M:\My Music, M:\My Pictures. My Documents still resides on drive C.
Disk 3 is failing. Any sort of write operation fails, chkdsk cannot fix the disk. I moved My Videos to drive O:\My Videos. Changed all library locations to update the changed locations as well as the "user" folder shortcuts. All library data has been copied to another drive, drive O. All well and good.
When I actually pull Disk 3 because all data has been backed up to other drives, I completely lose my video library. Media Center and Media Player lose the video libraries, Media Player loses all libraries. I have tried to change the locations of the libraries in Media Center, the change fails to stick. With failed drive removed, Media Center will no longer give me "Manage Video Library", nothing happens. (Screenshot shows what no longer is available after pulling drive E.) All media is lost in Media Player, although it still resides on it's library targets in Explorer. I had to change security settings on the new target, Drive O, because only System had access, now Everyone has read an execute access. This got rid of the "Unresponsive" label I got in Media Player when managing the library on this drive. But still, if I pull the failed drive from the system, my media libraries are lost for Media Player and Media Center. Plug the failing drive back in, the media libraries are restored to Player and Center.
I have been at this for days, I cannot imagine I overlooked anything, yet this issue persists. There are some game shortcuts on the desktop that are unresolved because some games were installed to the failed disk.
Bottom Line: If I pull the now backed up failing drive (No write capacity), I lose my libraries in Player and Center. What else is there left to check? This is NOT an easy problem to fix! Help.
EDIT: I did find some library links in the user folder that were not properly set. I mean the *real* library links with the Location tab in properties. I had some shortcuts created to "My Videos" but the actual library link itself was not changed properly. I made the change and deleted the shortcuts. Have not tested it yet as this is a BIG hassle. Rebooting, unplugging the drive, watching my libraries fail, rebooting, putting the drive back, and rebuilding the libraries again for now.
EDIT 2: The My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos folders are all *gone* again, in a space of a couple of hours! I just saw them, set the locations correct, and deleted the shortcuts I made before because I could not find them. They are gone again. The mystery deepens...
...no wonder nobody is helping. This is a TOTAL PITA! I got back the missing "Magic Folders" in my user folder. Thanks to a very, very good tutorial here:
Repair missing User folders in Windows 7 | Scottie?s Tech.Info
It is almost 5:00 AM, will work on this more tomorrow.
Last edited by Ohmster; 13 Aug 2015 at 20:31. Reason: add screencap, edit