Environment & problem creation:
I have an old computer running Windows 10, because the hardware is too old to upgrade to Windows 11. This runs with a user account connected to the internet/M$. Let’s call this computer C1.
Then I have a new computer running Windows 11 with an offline user account. This is C2.
Now I was in the process of slowly migrating from C1 to C2, when the power supply of C1 broke. I wanted to fix or replace this, but just to be safe, connect the system drive SATA SSD of C1 directly to C2 to backup the most important files first.
So I connected the SSD to C2 and tried to access the user home folder but without luck, permission denied, even with explorer started as admin. Searched for solutions: 1) take ownership of C:UsersMyUser -> rejected, because I wanted to keep the original owner, so that C1 would still work. 2) Add “everyone” with full access. This did an recursive operation with some subdirs failing, but most worked.
This worked so that I could read my Thunderbird Profile within AppData, which is all I wanted to do for the time.
Problem:
Now I had my PSU for C1 replaced and reconnected the SSD to C1. Startup.
Proper powerup, login. Now Windows said “Preparing Windows” on login. Afterwards it showed a mostly empty Desktop, only some icons, possibly those residing in AllUsers/Desktop. Warning message popping up “We can’t sign in to your account. This can often be fixed by signing out and in again. If you don’t sign out now, any files you create or change will be lost.” This is because it created a temporary profile for me.
Logged out and in again, exactly the same procedure.
Restarted. Now at bootup, Windows showed that it could not boot because of an NTFS failure. No auto-fix suggestion. Restarted -> same.
What I’ve tried so far:
Connected SSD to C2 again. Boot -> Prompt to do chkdsk on boot. Skipped because I though what would have damaged my disk, I didn’t instant-poweroff or so, unless being told to.
Drive is assigned with a drive letter in explorer, but could not access the drive. Could not even run chkdsk via the right-click -> properties -> tools, because “Windows can’t access this drive” or something.
Restart -> run chkdsk here. Took a few minutes.
Done -> Drive is accessible in C2 again. So SSD back to C1.
Booting C1 successful. Logging in -> same behavior as before: temporary account. Sign-out and back: no fix. Keeping the system running and exploring the situation in explorer. Tried to remove the superfluous access rights to MyUser dir. Indeed, an “unknown user” was shown in the rights list. But when removing that, an error message popped up for probably every single subfolder and file. Now this “unknown user” is removed from my home dir, but on restart, everything is still the same (temp profile).
I noticed now, that my homedir is owned by “Administrators” but has no access rights for my actual user. So I tried the following steps:
cd C:UsersMyUser and takeown /R /F .. Afterwards changing the owner of the MyUser dir itself back to SYSTEM (this is how it is on C2).
Then running
icacls "C:UsersMyUser" /grant "MYCOMPUTER/MyUser":(F) /t
to give me full access aswell.
After sign-out/in and after restart, nothing changed, still temp profile.
Consulted ChatGPT which recommended some ways. Mostly again fiddling with access rights and something about Registry Keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionProfileList. Removing the .bak and setting State and RefCount to 0 (State was at 0x8000). Also renaming “NTUSER.DAT.+” files by appending an “.old” (i.e. everything starting with NTUSER.DAT but not that file itself). Tried all that with the computer admin account, which I activated temporarily.
In between I noticed that I can successfully log into my account in safe mode!
Do you have any more advice what to do to be able to log-in to my regular account on C1 again?
I’m thinking about trying this next, but can’t really see what this does. I sadly don’t have enough free HDD capacity to backup the entire drive first.
