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Lost myWin10 User Partition Name
Out of the blue, Windows removed my USER Folder Name from my users table. This has got so complicated. This is typical instalation of WIN10.
I had two folders, one called USER (Really my name. I use USER to keep this conversation generic) and my ADMIN Folder. But now I can only boot to my ADMIN folder. I checked the name structure on the hard disk. It's definitely gone.
I don't have access to anything on this USER folder with Win10 interface, but can see everything on the disk. I still have access to my ADMIN folder. But even this is flaky. Sometimes it boots directly in to ADMIN normally. other times I get a flashing screen, which I can use ctrl-alt-del to get to the ADMIN home page.
But this has some pretty awful shortcomings. My USER folder had access to my password manager and my emails. But I don't have this access to my password manager or my emails in my ADMIN folder. This is a Catch-22 situation:
1) OK. Lets take the mails first. I can't get access to my emails because the account which controls my email provider, Mailbird, I can't login to, because it's controlled by an email which I don't know the password for. After much requesting with no reply, and being desparate, I bought a second account, so I now have 2 accounts with my email privider. And I started to import the message databases into my 2nd account. To my surprise, all gMail accounts imported without any problem. I tried to import the other email accounts but it quite naturally, fails because it wants the password from my first account. Which I don't have because I can't login to the first account (yet).
2) My password manager is also managed by an account which is on my USER Partition. And the password manager, NORD, absolutely refuses to allow me access to my account by diverting the password change request form to a gmail address so that I can login. Which some websites have allowed.
This 1) & 2) really only highlights the difficulties this lost USER folder get's you into. So I started searching the web. On Microsoft's own website they had a possible solution for this, but can't garantee it will work for everybody of course. But search as I can, I cannot find this article again which had about 368 followers it was helping. They actually had a whole string of slightly different solutions until this article which I cannot find in my searched. Maybe given another couple of days of searching, I might find it again. But I didn't fully understand the solution. So I thought I would post in my favorite Win 10 forum for any advice I might get.
Everything seems to be in place on the disk itself. The USER folder is there, and all the subfolders are there also. So I'm actually quite confident If I could add the USER name back to the partition table? I have a good chance of everything being clean again. I suppose it would also be possible to copy everthing in that folder tree under admin, so I could have my work files not showing as protected. It's quite difficult without some access to those workfiles.
OK. I've gone on for too long (I know). Time to stop and give you a chance to reply. like how common is this?
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After looking again at my file structure. I think it's more correct to call USER & ADMIN as folders, not as partitions. I've correct partitions to folders.
Last edited by stub; 24 Jan 2022 at 06:50.