Clone Disk that contains Users data, but not the OS

[Other Foot]

I have a Windows 10 Pro system with 3 SSDs. The C: drive has the OS, but the Users portion of that OS has been moved to the E: drive and has worked quite well for 2+ years. However, the 500 GB E: drive is getting full fast, so I purchased a 5 TB HDD to take its place. (In case you are wondering about the D: SSD - I use that for the scratch disk/virtual memory/etc.)

I purchased Acronis True Image 2017 to help me clone the old drive and recreate it to the new HDD. There doesn't seem to be any instructions that I could find that addresses this situation. I thought I did the job right and the computer restarted after the cloning process and both drives, the existing and the new, had the identical files and folders.

When I shut the computer down and removed the old E: and connected the new HDD in its place (using the same SATA cable that the old drive used), the computer would not finish booting, giving this error:

The ProfSvc service failed the sign-in.
User profile cannot be loaded.​

I shut down again and reconnected the old E: drive and I was back to normal (I had to log out, then back in again, but otherwise no prob).

Now I'm back to where I started. I s'pose I will have to reformat the new drive and clone it again, but there's a step or more that I ain't getting right. I need your help, please. It may just be the option presented to make the drive bootable or not. I chose not because it's not the OS drive I'm cloning. But that was prob'ly the wrong choice because the Users profile has to boot up with the OS drive.

Your guidance will be appreciated.

 

[BigFeet]

I assume that you wouldn't have to clone the drive. I would just copy the folders to the new drive, then link the libraries to there. You should then be able to remove the old drive. I haven't had to do that before, but that's how I would try and do it. Just keep the folders on the old drive until you're sure you can boot and access those folders through your libraries.

 

[BigFeet]

After moving the folders, right click on Documents/Downloads/Videos, etc, select Properties, then Location, then Find Target. Find the folder on the new drive.

 

[Other Foot]

I think there's an issue when I want to finally remove the original drive and have the new drive become the old drive letter. On boot, the system is looking for the User profile on E:, but the new drive volume is referred to as G:, even if it is using the E: drive's original data cable.

I think. I'm kinda flyin' by the seat of my pants here. Not sure I can afford guesswork on this. What I do know is, if Windows can't find the User profile when booting up, there is no way to log into Windows and it won't finish loading.

 

[clifford_cooley]

Use Disk Management and force the drive letters to switch before you remove the old drive. It should work, I've done this myself.

 

[Data]

@Other Foot

If the drive letter has changed and Windows is looking for profile data that is no longer where it expects, this could explain your issue.

With the old drive connected and system booted, move the profile to a fixed drive like C:, then reboot to ensure the change works, if it does, you can then replace the old drive for the new, and when system has booted with new drive attached, you can then, if necessary re-assign drive letters in case this was the issue and move the profile back to this new drive.

Edit: If the system boots with error and allows you to change drive letters directly as suggested by @clifford_cooley then use this method first.

 

[Norton]

I use cliffords method.

 

[Other Foot]

Thank you BigFeet, Clifford and Data for your replies and support. I'm sorry I left you hangin'. My original problem, as you pointed out, was that I moved not just the user data files (Documents, Pictures, etc.), but the folders and files of C:\Users was redirected/moved to E:\Users et al. The only user left on C: was C:\Users\Administrator - I wasn't able to move that folder. That was all done several years ago on the Windows 8.1 system. When Windows 10 installed, it didn't complain. It prob'ly should have.

I've since learned that moving data folders is fine, but one should not move the Users profile folders. It's actually very easy to create a new folder/file system on a separate drive and just point each of the C:\Users\[username]\ data folders to its counterpart on the other drive. However, if you did what I did a long time ago, it becomes quite a chore to move those user profile folders back to C:.

Searching the Internet, I discovered I'm not the only foolish guy behind a keyboard. I found instructions to get the profile folders moved back and doing it with empty data folders (after all, there wasn't enough room on the C: drive either). Once I finally did that, and also fixed the problem with my Outlook 2016 PST files, I have my system running pretty smooth. Of course, this resulted in an already too small C: drive to get perilously close to being full, so I put the now unused 512 GB SSD, formerly known as E:, to work as a clone of C: and used it to replace my 128 GB SSD, C:.

Sorry, I don't do well with making long stories short. Thanks for your willingness to help me out. I'm happy to be back to normal now.

 

[Data]

@Other Foot np, and thanks for letting us know.

So the other shoe dropped , we all know that feeling.

Glad you're sorted.