Well, today my Windows user profile thing apparently got corrupt when I was moving stuff around and cleaning up stuff. Every time I tried to log in to my account, I got an error that read:

Quote:

The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.

So, I backed up all my data, deleted the profile, then made sure the account was gone, and recreated the account (with exact username), and tried logging into it. Same error. Deleted the profile and account once more, and tried using a different username for the new account. Same error.

Currently, the only working account is the Administrator account. However, it itself has some issues, for example Firefox and Opera complain about missing profiles and refuse to start (leaving only IE9, which is slow as fuck for some reason).

GPFontaine wrote:

Sounds like a corrupt Default user profile. Sucks... Google: "fix corrupt default user profile windows 7" Yuck... Pretty much any fix for this sucks. Also, did you use the utility to delete the profiles or did you just delete C:\Users\Username

I removed the user account, then modified the registry to completely remove the profile, and deleted the C:/Users/<username>.

But anyways, my issue is no longer; I got the machine reimaged. HOWEVER, I still have something that I want done.

The copy of Windows that the machine has been reimaged with is set up to have the Users folder on a seperate partition for no good reason (No, this isn't a machine with an SSD and HDD, or even two hard drives/solid-state drives. Just the one hard drive).

What I was trying to do before (before I ran into the profile issues), was move the Users folder to drive C: (using these instructions, kinda). However, I did not have any USB Windows 7 recovery/installation media (and didn't want to wait for it to download, and to hunt down a USB for it), so I just tried a regular copy. A few files with names like NTUSER.DAT failed to copy due to Windows or some process having an exclusive lock on these (I guess these had something to do with the profile).

If those instructions linked above look good for this task, I will follow them, this time doing things right and using a Windows 7 install/recovery USB.

EDIT: Made a W7 recovery USB, and tried the instuctions.

When I try to use robocopy, it gives me an error (error 3) about not being able to access a non-existant folder on the partition I am attempting to copy to. copy gives an error about not being able to find "D:\Users\*". This folder exists, and contains items.

Windows, what the shit? This is why my next laptop, without any doubt, is going to be a MacBook. Hopefully I will be able to convince my school's IT staff to put their wireless certificate on it.

GPFontaine wrote:

Robocopy is NOT a generic consumer tool. It is an advanced file copy utility intended for computing professionals. In fact, I needed to use it for a particular use case at work yesterday and it took me a solid 10-15 minutes to get my switches correct for the exact type of output I needed for logging. While I am guessing that it can handle errors with order of commands, the article's command-line is flat out wrong. Correct Syntax: robocopy <Source> <Destination> [<File>[ ...]] [<Options>] The article did this: robocopy [<Options>] <Source> <Destination> As for moving the user profile for no good reason... ugh... Why? This is the specific reason why Microsoft created Libraries. For fuck's sake. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/libraries Listen, if you want to hack up your OS, that is totally fine, but don't expect an extremely customized version of Windows to work without constant interaction and troubleshooting. Likewise, the same is true for OS X and Linux. The more you deviate from the original design, the more that you will need to put your own effort into maintaining.

I'm trying to set up Windows to be like any typical Windows install. That shouldn't be too hard, unless whoever created the image I reimaged from went to great lengths to mess with the installation in a way that can't be easily repaired (and it could be so, this isn't just some quick symbolic link job).

And on the case of Linux (OS X has the graphical Directory Utility for doing this), all I have to do to move my home folder is create the new directory for the home folder, copy stuff from original home folder in if wanted, change the home directory setting in the /etc/passwd file (I could even use a command-line or graphical utility for this), log out than in again, delete the old home folder and be done with it. They only way this could break anything is if I use an application or script that uses hardcoded directories for dealing with user settings, rather than the $PATH variable, which would make the application or script defective by it's own design.

GPFontaine wrote:

So in other words, Windows isn't the same as OS X isn't the same as Linux and if you don't understand the reasoning behind its architecture, it is flawed by its own design?

I wasn't saying Windows was flawed by design, that bit had nothing to do with Windows.