All hell breaks loose after connecting drive to a different PC

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  1. Posts : 5
    Windows 10
       #1

    All hell breaks loose after connecting drive to a different PC


    I was helping someone migrate from one computer to another. Because there was a lot of data and time was limited I pulled the hard drive from the old computer and hooked it up with a USB adapter to the new one. To copy the data I used Windows Explorer on the new computer and navigated to F:\Users\Mike. When I clicked the folder to open I had to click a button to grant me access to the folder.

    After a while I could browse and copy everything I needed from F:\Users\Mike.

    I put the drive back in its old system and it booted up fine and everything looked normal. But, a few hours after I left all hell broke loose. First Windows blanked the screen and displayed a message at the bottom saying "Repairing disk errors. This might take over an hour to complete." with a little spinning dots icon above it. Then after a restart (or two) lots of other errors came up.

    Dropbox error: "Couldn't start Dropbox. This is usually because of a permissions error. Storing your home folder on a network share can also cause an error"

    Desktop: "You don't currently have permission to access this folder. Click Continue to permanently get access to this folder." (The user clicked Continue)

    Acrobat Distiller: "Unable to create the temporary folder. Error -5 - Access is denied."

    The background / wallpaper image is gone, desktop is black.

    Windows Start Menu icon visible but doesn't respond to clicks.

    There's lots of other little glitches. Earlier today I couldn't get to a command prompt from the Task Manager, but now I can so I'm running "sfc /scannow" to see if any of that helps.

    I also tried reassigning permissions but ran into some errors there too.

    And I tried logging in as a different user, but can't seem to accomplish that either.

    I've removed drives to load data onto other computers many times in the past. Usually they're disposing of the old PC and not too worried about making it work again. But, as I recall I've been able to boot and run the drive in it's old PC with no real issues. Maybe it's something about Windows 10 that is different or maybe it's something else.

    Thanks for any guidance!
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 18,424
    Windows 11 Pro
       #2

    What steps did you take prior to disconnected the hard drive from the USB port?
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 5
    Windows 10
    Thread Starter
       #3

    Just the regular "Safely remove..." command and waited for the green light to disconnect.
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 18,424
    Windows 11 Pro
       #4

    Not sure what happened then...normally something like that is caused by improper removal of the drive. Sounds like a clean install of Windows will be required. What I do in a situation like that is use something like Kyhi's recovery tools and a partition wizard program included on it to shrink the current OS partition to as small as possible and move it to very end of the drive, delete all other partitions and then do a clean install to the unallocated space at the front of the disk. After everything is retrieved from the old partition that needs to be, it can be deleted and that space reclaimed by expanding the existing partition or creating a new one.
      My Computer


  5. Posts : 5
    Windows 10
    Thread Starter
       #5

    Are there any permission fix tricks that might revive this machine?
      My Computer


  6. Posts : 5,478
    2004
       #6

    You could try secedit - it is still supposed to work in Windows 10 (according to this MS blog) but I've not tried it.

    To reset permissions to default run this in elevated command prompt
    Code:
    secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose
    Source

    I'd probably clean install myself but giving secedit a go certainly isn't likely to make it any worse than it already is.
      My Computer


  7. Posts : 5
    Windows 10
    Thread Starter
       #7

    Thanks for the idea. I just tried it then rebooted. Doesn't seemed to have helped.

    I'm going to try adding a new user account then migrate the data over.
      My Computer


  8. Posts : 5
    Windows 10
    Thread Starter
       #8

    Added new profile from command prompt. Rebooted and the new user profile worked nicely. Then I used ForensIT profile wizard to copy the profile from the old to the new. After another reboot it signed in then took about 8 hours to get through "Updating Store App 1 of 81" When it finished the new profile had all the problems of the old one
      My Computer


  9. Posts : 5,478
    2004
       #9

    infotime said:
    Added new profile from command prompt. Rebooted and the new user profile worked nicely. Then I used ForensIT profile wizard to copy the profile from the old to the new.
    Why did you do that (my bold here)? Do you think ForestIT caused the problem or updating the apps?

    If a new profile works you could just dump all your documents into C:\Users\Public\Documents from the old profile and then copy them out of there into the new profile. Going through Public gets rid of authority issues (assuming everything else is OK).

    Could be the permissions on WindowsApps are screwed though (if updating the Apps causes the issue) in which case clean install will almost certainly be quicker than trying to figure out how exactly.
      My Computer


  10. Posts : 1,621
    Windows 10 Home
       #10

    Maybe the following will help: tweaking.com's Windows Repair (All in One), Safe Mode with Networking, clicking items 26 & 27 along with anything mentioning permissions, Restarting once if not twice, letting Windows come to full desktop.
      My Computer


 

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