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I recently got a new computer. Because my current computer is kind of faulty, I took the fastest and least painful route to getting the 840+ GB of data on it to an external hard drive to bring to this new machine. I took a program called "Macrium Reflect" and straight cloned my internal HDD to the passport plugged into a USB port.

So my hard drive is cloned now. But I don't want to use it as a boot drive, the other machine should be fine enough to handle a copy operation. My issue is that NTFS permissions have bricked the other machine's ability to access the drive, and there are absolute loads of symlinks pointing to locations on my C: drive, or in the case of documents and settings, absolutely stupid loops for takeown.

I want this drive to be perfectly accessible by the other computer. Meaning I want the symlinks that come with my user folder to go away, obviously without deleting the original content, and I want documents and settings to be gone. I tried using takeown to give myself ownership of the entire drive, and this happened.

INFO: The system cannot find the path specified. ( "F:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\ApplicationData\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\SystemData\S-1-5-18"

I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to break quite that hard. I tried deleting the symlinks, but it acts like it deleted them and they don't actually go away. Command line can't even find them. Anything I can do?

Information:
All drives in use here are terabyte drives, the external is a Western Digital My Passport. The operating systems involved are Windows 10 version 1709, (Fall Creators Update). The drive is absolutely packed with files, like 3 gigabytes of midi files only and 250+ more of sound effects and music etc, so recursive operations tend to take forever.

If it matters, I am a blind user, so screenshots and such won't be helpful, and I cannot see whatever icons they put on controls in GUIs. Just tell me what to press and my screen reader should be able to find it. I can use command line if we have to go that route.

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This appears to be a Macrium-specific "feature," as I haven't seen this until I ran a Macrium Reflect backup that failed. It's not normally supposed to repeat ApplicationData\ApplicationData... like that, so if any others are experiencing that, you may want to contact Macrium support.

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  • Whaat? It may not be a specific answer to the OP, but if my assumption is correct and Macruim Software generates these links, the manufacturer may be the best source to resolve the issue. So you're gonna downvote the only person who had even a hint of an answer? I also wanted to alert any future readers that this may be related to Macrium software.
    – GlennFromIowa
    Commented Apr 1, 2020 at 16:35

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