0

I just installed an additional hard drive into my Windows 7 PC and want to move the home directory (D:\Users\Name) to the new hard drive. To do this, I robocopied the old directory to the new drive (keeping file attributes, permissions and skipping junctions) and changed the location in the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfileImagePath registry key as described here. Now when I log in, I am greeted by a temporary user profile and the event log suggests that Windows can not find the local profile (EventId 1511), being as unhelpful as ever and offering no further information. Of course the path that I set in the registry exists and has the same permissions as the old directory (as far as I can tell), so I can't understand why Windows can't find it. You will probably tell me that I should just give up and move only the documents/pictures/etc folders. This isn't acceptable to me because countless applications put config files directly into the home directory. I am 100% certain that it's possible to do this, because the directory that I'm moving it from was already on a separate drive. I managed to do it a few years ago in the same way.

Does anyone have an idea what the problem could be? I can only guess that the drive somehow isn't mounted when the user profile is loaded, but the drive properties look identical. Perhaps Windows assumes that H: is never a local drive?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

The registry changes may have easily bashed the profile in terms of Window ownership.

See if you can make a new user, make it a member of the Admin group.

Keep this user and its parts all on drive C:

There are "pointers" to data in USERs AppData and its many folders owning the data you moved.

Improve this answer
4
  • I can't really follow you. Can you elaborate? I have another user account that is an administrator and made the registry changes from that account while being logged out of the account to be moved. Note that simply changing back the ProfileImagePath in the registry to the old value makes it work again.
    – Grisu47
    Commented Apr 1, 2022 at 21:58
  • Use Windows Tools (not the registry) to change the location of My Documents, My Pictures, My Videos and Outlook PST / OST files. There are pointers in AppData to some of these things, so avoid the registry and use standard Windows Tools. Make a new User and recover your data that way if need be. Moving back is reasonable evidence of what I am saying.
    – anon
    Commented Apr 1, 2022 at 22:06
  • Only moving My Documents, My Pictures, and so on is not acceptable for the reasons that I outlined above. I know that it is possible to move the entire home directory to a different drive, because my current home directory is already on a drive different from the system drive. I just need to move it again.
    – Grisu47
    Commented Apr 1, 2022 at 22:19
  • What I should have been more clear about is: Make a new user, recover documents and email into that. Then when done mover the parts of a user profile you can with Windows Tools. If you can make the new User entirely on a different drive (I do not but you can try).
    – anon
    Commented Apr 1, 2022 at 22:40

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .