How to recover C:\Users folder

Question

Today I was moving C:\Users to another partition using symlink junction method.

I had the great idea of making the symlink junction from C:\Users => U:\, instead of C:\Users => U:\Users.

Sadly, I've deleted the original "Users" folder and now, when I try to login, it says that The User Profile Service failed the logon.

Maybe I'm wrong, but this is because the root directory of user profiles isn't the system one, so now when I create C:\Users, I can't log into Windows and I get the above error message.

How can create a new C:\Users directory and workaround the problem?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Problem seems to be that your C:\Users is either empty or unreadable. There should be service accounts (with their registry files) and user accounts (with personal registry files) and default skeleton account for new users. I remember that some older Windows version (was it XP?) screwed up system registry (at least user id's) if there is anything wrong with user registry files. This case is easy to find out as after that ACL management window shows only user ID's but not names in user list.

If you still have profiles at U:\ then try to just move them back to C:\Users\. Initially you could give C:\Users\ full permissions to everyone, it should work after that.

However, user folders contains permissions (in their ACL's) that is inherited from parent and that parent (originally C:\ and C:\Users\) is now killed so you may want to check those permissions after system is working again.

Another thing that you may want to use is junction when you want same files/information appear in two folders. At least it worked very well in similar situations. Yes, symlink may also do but I'm not going to recommend it because I have not had situation that requires symlinks (read: I have no experience with ntfs symlinks).