Trying to switch drive names, and move User folder!

Okay, so long ago I moved my User folder off of my boot 240GB SSD to one
of my large 3TB HDD's. Boot drive C where OS and programs are, data
drive D where Users folder is. It's been working like that for years,
worked fine in both Windows 7 and 10 equally. Over the years, even some
large programs (games mostly) have started to be installed on this D
drive, as they're too big for the SSD.

Well, so recently there was a sale on a 500-gig SSD and I picked one up.
I decided to keep both the original 240GB SSD as my C drive and the new
480GB SSD as my new D drive. I'll keep the original D HDD drive too and
turn it into the G drive. The new SSD is not as big as the old HDD to
fit everything from it, but it's big enough to fit the Users folder, as
well as the large Program folder that existed on the old HDD.

I do daily backups of the User folder on Macrium. So I copied the Users
folder from the Macrium restore files. And copied the programs folders
directly from the HDD. Okay, so it took awhile but everything that
needed transferring, got copied to the new SSD.

Then when that was all finished, I rebooted the computer into Safe Mode.
While in Safe Mode, I went into Disk Manager, and swapped the drive
letters from the HDD and the new SSD with each other. Rebooted, and
hoped for the best. Much to my surprise, it booted up properly, and when
I logged into my account, it seemed to work too. The desktop looked
identical, and all startup programs seemed to startup properly.

Then the "one odd thing" happened. Whenever I clicked on the Windows
Button, I expect to see the menu of programs available to be started
manually. Clicking on that button brought nothing up. It wasn't just an
empty menu, the menu itself wouldn't pop-up at all. Couldn't even use it
to restart the computer or log out of my account. Had to use the
alternative ways to do those things.

So then I restarted the computer back into Safe mode, again. I swapped
the drive letters again and brought the old HDD back to be my D drive
again, and that's the way it's working now. Everything works fine on the
HDD as D drive, but the Start menus don't work on SSD as D drive.

So what could be causing this problem to occur on the new SSD?

Yousuf Khan

On 11/12/2018 8:52 AM, Paul wrote:
I would have done this via cloning.

Macrium can clone&resize in one step.

However, you'd need to "edit" the partition
first, which would mean cloning an exact
copy to a scratch 3TB drive, edit the scratch
drive, then clone the remainder of the scratch
to the smaller SSD (while using the resize function).

orig -- scratch -- new 500GB
3TB 3TB SSD (clone & shrink)
(edit)
*******

Well, actually the D drive is nearly 2/3 full (it used to be over 3/4
full, but I had already done some trimming and moving off to other
drives). There's more than just this data that I mentioned here on this
drive. That's part of the reason for moving the mentioned folders to the
SSD, so that I can dedicate the HDD to storing more of the other data.

Program Files is normally owned by TrustedInstaller.

Using the Security tab, who owns the stuff now ?

Did your procedure modify them ?

Well, the programs that were on this drive were placed there by Steam,
so the folder is called SteamLibrary, and another separate program
Folder called Space Engine. Both of these folders were directly on the
root directory not on any "Program Files" type subfolder. I don't know
who would own these folders, is it Steam or TrustedInstaller? All of
these folders were moved using Robocopy with the "-copyall" option, to
copy all permissions.

I'll also mention that even the User folder was copied from its Macrium
backup using Robocopy, because I couldn't get Macrium's default restore
function to put the folders into the right spot. So I had to mount the
backup as a virtual disk instead and do a copy using Robocopy instead.

Yousuf Khan

On 11/12/2018 10:51 AM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'll also mention that even the User folder was copied from its Macrium
backup using Robocopy, because I couldn't get Macrium's default restore
function to put the folders into the right spot. So I had to mount the
backup as a virtual disk instead and do a copy using Robocopy instead.

Just an update, I think I noticed one problem with my backups. It looks
like there Directory Junctions in the User folder that point to a
location in C:\ProgramData, which was missing from the backups. In fact,
there are all kinds of Directory Junctions all over the place in that
folder.

Yousuf Khan

On 11/12/2018 5:45 AM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
Then the "one odd thing" happened. Whenever I clicked on the Windows
Button, I expect to see the menu of programs available to be started
manually. Clicking on that button brought nothing up. It wasn't just an
empty menu, the menu itself wouldn't pop-up at all. Couldn't even use it
to restart the computer or log out of my account. Had to use the
alternative ways to do those things.

So then I restarted the computer back into Safe mode, again. I swapped
the drive letters again and brought the old HDD back to be my D drive
again, and that's the way it's working now. Everything works fine on the
HDD as D drive, but the Start menus don't work on SSD as D drive.

So what could be causing this problem to occur on the new SSD?

Yousuf Khan

Okay, so as usual nothing goes as you easily think it should. Finally
got it working (cross my fingers). Macrium Reflect's restore system is
****, brain-dead. If it weren't for being able to mount its backups as
virtual drives, there wouldn't be enough flexibility to restore things
the way it should be restored. Once mounted, you can treat it like a
regular file system, and copy stuff back and forth using standard system
tools. However, Macrium's virtual filesystem emulates FAT32 rather than
NTFS, so when you restore that way, you lose file ownership and extended
attributes information. Also directory junctions and other NTFS features
don't work anymore. So if you want to keep all of that metadata then you
have to restore in Reflect's standard way, and it's going to decide
where it wants to put your data, you don't get that choice. Once Reflect
stores to its the data in the place it deems the right place, then you
have to use file move commands to put your files in the right place!

The reason the menus didn't work was because a directory junction to the
"All Users" folder was missing. So I had to pre-create the entire Users
folder tree using the "Robocopy /create" command, which only creates
directories and zero-length files as placeholders for the actual files
that came later.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 11/12/2018 5:45 AM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
Then the "one odd thing" happened. Whenever I clicked on the Windows
Button, I expect to see the menu of programs available to be started
manually. Clicking on that button brought nothing up. It wasn't just
an empty menu, the menu itself wouldn't pop-up at all. Couldn't even
use it to restart the computer or log out of my account. Had to use
the alternative ways to do those things.

So then I restarted the computer back into Safe mode, again. I swapped
the drive letters again and brought the old HDD back to be my D drive
again, and that's the way it's working now. Everything works fine on
the HDD as D drive, but the Start menus don't work on SSD as D drive.

So what could be causing this problem to occur on the new SSD?

Yousuf Khan

Okay, so as usual nothing goes as you easily think it should. Finally
got it working (cross my fingers). Macrium Reflect's restore system is
****, brain-dead. If it weren't for being able to mount its backups as
virtual drives, there wouldn't be enough flexibility to restore things
the way it should be restored. Once mounted, you can treat it like a
regular file system, and copy stuff back and forth using standard system
tools. However, Macrium's virtual filesystem emulates FAT32 rather than
NTFS, so when you restore that way, you lose file ownership and extended
attributes information. Also directory junctions and other NTFS features
don't work anymore. So if you want to keep all of that metadata then you
have to restore in Reflect's standard way, and it's going to decide
where it wants to put your data, you don't get that choice. Once Reflect
stores to its the data in the place it deems the right place, then you
have to use file move commands to put your files in the right place!

The reason the menus didn't work was because a directory junction to the
"All Users" folder was missing. So I had to pre-create the entire Users
folder tree using the "Robocopy /create" command, which only creates
directories and zero-length files as placeholders for the actual files
that came later.

Yousuf Khan

Try the following.

1) Macrium 6.3.x
(Capability removed in 7.x at some point)
2) Make a backup == MRIMG
3) Use the menu item for conversion afterwards
Convert MRIMG == VHD
4) In Disk Management, mount the VHD.
5) Now, try copying the files from the newly
mounted drive.

That's a second path besides using the Macrium
MRIMG built-in mounter for the "FAT32-like result".

Since that converts the whole backup, you could
be converting a 1TB backup to a ~1TB VHD before
extracting some smaller amount of files.

But it might allow you to Robocopy stuff. Or
generate a reference icacls playback file, for
repairing the permissions on the actual target.

I've not tried running any icacls permissions
backups on one of those, to see how closely it
conforms to the original permissions and ownership.
But I don't see a reason it wouldn't be "perfect".

If you want to avoid the middleman, there is
always "disk2vhd" on Sysinternals.com. That's if
you want to explore the concept further, without
using Macrium at all. You could do a full backup
as a VHD or VHDX, and since you're in Windows 10,
be able to mount it in Disk Management at a later
time. The VHDX format allows handling more than
2.2TB of files.

A further example of that, is the Windows 7 Backup
package in Control Panels, which stores individual
partitions as a VHDX.

If you need to work with representations that
preserve permissions and ownership, there are ways.

Some of the disk properties are handled by "inheritance".
If you work on a subset of a disk, restoring it from
adhoc backup by some means, you may need to playback
an icacls permissions and ownership file against it,
to put everything back precisely as it was before.

Somehow, as a computer model, it just doesn't
seem worth it at times. The permissions model is
a failure, in terms of usability. A royal pain
to get it right. Plenty of ways to get a copy
of your bank statement, not so easy to get
all the stuff put back properly on a VFS
portion of your C: drive. There are still
parts of C: that are totally unworkable
for the "xcopy crowd". I wouldn't want to have
to work in certain parts of C: - it would drive
me crazy. It's a good thing those parts haven't
broken (yet). I couldn't find a way to delete
some of those (tried... everything).

Paul

On 11/12/2018 6:45 PM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
Okay, so long ago I moved my User folder off of my boot 240GB SSD to one
of my large 3TB HDD's. Boot drive C where OS and programs are, data
drive D where Users folder is. It's been working like that for years,
worked fine in both Windows 7 and 10 equally. Over the years, even some
large programs (games mostly) have started to be installed on this D
drive, as they're too big for the SSD.

Well, so recently there was a sale on a 500-gig SSD and I picked one up.
I decided to keep both the original 240GB SSD as my C drive and the new
480GB SSD as my new D drive. I'll keep the original D HDD drive too and
turn it into the G drive. The new SSD is not as big as the old HDD to
fit everything from it, but it's big enough to fit the Users folder, as
well as the large Program folder that existed on the old HDD.
....
So then I restarted the computer back into Safe mode, again. I swapped
the drive letters again and brought the old HDD back to be my D drive
again, and that's the way it's working now. Everything works fine on the
HDD as D drive, but the Start menus don't work on SSD as D drive.

So what could be causing this problem to occur on the new SSD?

Start Menu is a folder in C:\User\Your_account and in C:\Users\Public!

--
@~@ Remain silent! Drink, Blink, Stretch! Live long and prosper!!
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty!
/( _ )\ May the Force and farces be with you!
^ ^ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.39.3
¤£Â*ɶU! ¤£¶BÄF! ¤£½ä¿ú! ¤£´©¥æ! ¤£¥´¥æ! ¤£¥´§T! ¤£¦Û±þ! ¤£¨D¯«!
½�¦Ò¼{ºî´© (CSSA):
http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa

On 11/15/2018 8:54 PM, Paul wrote:
Try the following.

1) Macrium 6.3.x
(Capability removed in 7.x at some point)
2) Make a backup == MRIMG
3) Use the menu item for conversion afterwards
Convert MRIMG == VHD
4) In Disk Management, mount the VHD.
5) Now, try copying the files from the newly
mounted drive.

Interesting, I never upgraded to Macrium 7.x, remain on 6.3.x right now.
But I've never used the VHD conversion feature. I assume VHD will create
an NTFS virtual file system where Macrium's own virtual mounting system
produces only FAT32 partitions?

Anyways, I did finally get the backup to work, by letting Macrium
restore to where it wanted to, and then just moving the files to the
right place.

Yousuf Khan