Backing up a crashed system from the recovery console (or what10 calls  

I have a system that refuses to boot to Windows 10 Professional (64-bit), and I think I need to do a reinstall.
The advanced boot options is available, but it will not go into safe mode. I can however get the command line, and it recognizes both robocopy and xcopy.
Assume that C is the hard drive, and D is an external portable USB backup drive.
Anyways, from the command prompt I typed

robocopy c:\users d:\ /e /copyall /z /DCopyAT /R:3 /W:5

big mistake. I got stuck in some loop in c:\all users\applicationdata

where it kept making nested appdata folders and kept copying something from the public folder.

I attempted to delete the resulting d:\users with rd /s but got errors about the directory not empty.

I did a dir and thought I had a lot of free space due to misreading the number of commas as I wasn't fully awake yet, and tried to just go for my own user folder.

I tried xcopy since I was having trouble with robocopy

xcopy c:\users\slick d:\users\slick /e /c /f /g /k /y /z

This ran out of disk space, and I found I only had about 180gb on a 2tb drive and I had a lot more junk in my user folder.

exploring with the command prompt didn't show me any files. So I took the drive over to my working Windows 7 Professional computer (It's over 10 years old, and I tried win10 during the free upgrade, but it didn't perform well so I went back to 7. The computer came with Vista Home Premium; so please don't tell me to downgrade it to Windows 10. It's too old. Win7 was an upgrade, Win10 was a downgrade). I attempted to delete the resulting c;\users folder, but I cannot take ownership of parts of it, I cannot use the security tab to grant myself or the administrators group full control, and I cannot delete the damn folder that apparently is taking up over 1.5tb of data but getting properties won't acknowledge it.

Yes, I got the prompt about getting access, but it didn't work and told me to use the security tab. I also tired takeown.exe which didn't seem to work either.

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I get no error when trying to delete the users folder with Explorer when logged in as an admin, it just doesn't work.

The command prompt however gives this;

H:\>rd /s users

users, Are you sure (Y/N)? y

users\ALLUSE~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\AP

PLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1 - The dire

ctory is not empty.

users\slick\AppData\Local\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\

APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1 - The di

rectory is not empty.

H:\>rd /s "\\?\h:\users"

\\?\h:\users, Are you sure (Y/N)? y

\\?\h:\users\ALLUSE~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPL

IC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1 - T

he directory is not empty.

\\?\h:\users\slick\AppData\Local\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\AP

PLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1\APPLIC~1 -

The directory is not empty.

Chkdsk reports that there are thousands of files, which would be consistent with the stuff I saw it copying from my "phonebackup" folders that I saw when robocopy was going for days. However i can't see the files and I can't get rid of them. I have a huge fanfic library stored on my phone and the phonebackup is a quick and and easy way to restore everything when I reset my phone. Checkdsk also claims there are no errors to fix, yet things are FUBAR with that c:\users.

I'm about ready to reformat the drive, but I'm not sure if there are drivers or anything I need to keep on a seagate portable hard drive.


So anyways, a second question is what did I do wrong trying to backup the user directories with the command line? What command/parameters should I have used?

TL;DR?

1. 1. Should I reformat the backup drive to fix the mess my copy attempts made or what should I do to fix it,
2. 2. What command(s) should I have used (with what parms) to easily back up the public folder, my limited account, the admin account, and the other users's folders from the command line/recovery console?

Re-posted from the unhelpful Microsoft forums, sorta combining two posts. Feel free to reply there as well.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...4-96812a42fa76
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...f-ebb033df634c

P.S. the prompt here suggests I should include my version number. The VER command reports
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19041.1].