Fix You've been signed in with a temporary profile in Windows 10  

Brink said:

Waetherman,

A repair install is more of an option to use to avoid having to reinstall all your apps, accounts, and settings. If you don't mind starting from scratch, a clean install does give the best results.

If you linked the product key on the PC to your Microsoft account, then Windows 10 should automatically activate on the PC once you sign in with the same Microsoft account.

Microsoft Account - Link to Digital License on Windows 10 PC

I can't link my license to account now, because I can't open the settings applet shown in the tutorial . But I used Produkey to extract my key.

I already tried repair install, but when it asks you if you want to keep personal files, apps and settings or only personal files or nothing, I had two first options disabled for some reason (I guess because the active profile status is temporary) - so as you see the problem keeps me from fixing it.

As far as I know I can't do repair install from USB boot, but I have yet to try that as well as trying to restart in safe/clean mode and try to do a repair install there, but at this moment I'm tired and have enough of losing my time, so I already decided to just install dualboot Windows + Ubuntu and try to migrate to Linux. In the worst case it will turn out even worse than MS products and I will no longer feel so bad about losing so much time tinkering with my Windows. :)

Brink said:

Yeah, a clean install would be best in your situation.

Please let us know how it went.

It actually went interestingly.
A lot of time has passed since I started (2 days), but as I said, I had a lot of reconfiguring to do, as well as I wanted to figure out a way to not waste so much time in future. There's a saying that there are two types of PC users: those who backup data and those who will backup data, some add that there's a 3rd type - those who learned how to back up data properly.

So I browsed through c:\users\Marek (my username), and manually backed up documents, desktop etc. as well as some folders in AppData\local and \roaming. It didn't take much, because I already knew that for example Pidgin stores configuration and archive in ".purple" folder. Then, I proceeded to W10 clean install.

1. Produkey turned out alright, W10 installation would accept the key. I got relieved that W10 installer would ask me for the key before installation, and not after e.g. removing partitions on my drive. I'm not sure if it's possible that installer says the cd-key is valid, and then after installation Windows says the system is not activated - in my case everything was fine.

2. I removed all partitions on my SSD drive C:, then created a new partition - Windows actually created two instead, where the first had 500 MB size. Then I installed the system, installator restarted automatically and... the instalation would run again. Weird. So I removed all partitions again, created a new partition and... This time Windows created 4 partitions instead! one 450 MB, two even smaller and one with the rest of the size I specified. Very weird.

3. I didn't set to show hidden files and folders just right after the installation, so only now I noticed I have a $WINDOWS.~BT folder on my system partition which takes 6 GB! Where does it come from if I removed the partition? Maybe windows update creates it?

4. Just after installation I decided to create a restore point. So I went to configure it, set C: capacity to minimum 1% (1.1 GB) and external HDD to a reasonable 10% (50 GB). Then I created a restore point 'fresh', installed the most needed things like graphics driver and Firefox and created another restore point 'minimum'. Then, after installing some more things, I created a restore point "before music card", checked restore points and... 'fresh' and 'minimum' were already gone. I googled and made some tests and turns out while you can use additional drives for a restore point, it's just so you can restore content on these additional drives, but if you want to protect your system partition, you have to sacrifice space there.

5. Given the fact I have a SSD I bought a while ago and I simply can't sacrifice a lot of space, as well as the restore point just recently proved to be unreliable, I decided to just install Macrium Reflect to make system partition image from time to time. So I actually wanted to minimize the image size by turning the restore points off.

6. Another thing I wanted to do is to put all my documents to the external drive, so that I don't lose my work when I restore the system image. So I went to START: storage, and set everything except programs to e:, but it didn't work. I had to open windows explrorer, unpin all special folders from quick access, then go to C:\users\username\ and right-click on special folders, go to properties - location tab and move them.

7. Still, I wanted to avoid making backups of my program settings, so I went to C:\users\username\AppData\Local , opened command line there (I actually use a program that lets me open an elevated cmd in a folder), and created junctions like Mozilla --> "E:\w10\AppData\Local\Mozilla". So now some chosen apps which configuration is valuable to me, is stored on the external drive, that I can backup on a separate schedule from my main system partition.

8. The next time I have to make a clean install, I'll create myself a .BAT file, automatically deleting specific folders in AppData and creating junctions pointing to the configuration on E:\ drive.


edit: @down: yes, thanks for the tip, I was on exactly it right now, as I'm about to create the first image. Then I'm going to install some additional stuff as well as remove some MS programs I don't use (e-mail for example) and create another 'fresh' image.

I'm actually surprised you've read through my wall of text. :)

Brink said:

Hello Nate, :)

This is usually from something corrupting the account's profile, or the account's profile folder can't be found. For example, you moved the profile folder to another location that is not available during sign-in for whatever reason.

I hope this may help narrow down what could be causing it.

I suspect it's the latter of the options, I've a relatively small domain with sub 200 client machines but they're all on windows 10 and I have one of these issues every day. Starting to become a bug bear with my staff and as anybody in IT knows unhappy staff do not make for an easy job. I'll keep looking and post any finds in here.