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#1
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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 |
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#2
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Trying to switch drive names, and move User folder!
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 |
#3
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Trying to switch drive names, and move User folder!
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 |
#4
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Trying to switch drive names, and move User folder!
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 |
#5
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Trying to switch drive names, and move User folder!
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 |
#6
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Trying to switch drive names, and move User folder!
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 ¤£*ɶU! ¤£¶BÄF! ¤£½ä¿ú! ¤£´©¥æ! ¤£¥´¥æ! ¤£¥´§T! ¤£¦Û±þ! ¤£¨D¯«! ½Ð¦Ò¼{ºî´© (CSSA): http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa |
#7
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Trying to switch drive names, and move User folder!
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 |
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