I am trying to move C:\Users (SSD) to B:\Users (HDD) using the following tutorial on a clean install of Windows 8 -> upgraded to 8.1 straight away: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.itnota.com/move-users-directory-to-a-different-drive-in-windows-8/
They are mapped in the following way:
SSD - C:\ in Explorer, D:\ in Command Prompt
HDD - B:\ in Explorer, E:\ in Command Prompt
I tried mapping using the following commands:
robocopy /copyall /mir /xj D:\Users E:\Users (no failures)
rmdir /S /Q D:\Users (worked fine)
Until I got to the following issue here:
mklink /J D:\Users B:\Users
(linking command line source to Windows explorer target)
B:\ is a normal, local, NTFS, non-networked drive, however I just kept getting the following error:
"local volumes are required to complete the operation"
No tutorials have mentioned this as a potential error and any results appear to be about networked drives. I mistakenly tried mapping to E:\Users after this, thinking I should map to the command prompt drive listing rather than the explorer listing as I thought that's what had caused my error. This led to:
'User Profile Service' error - "User profile service failed the sign-in - user profile cannot be loaded"
Trying to copy E:\Users (B:\Users) back to D:\Users (C:\Users) after using rmdir to remove the failed D:\Users link. C:\Users is back in place, but I still get the User Profile Service Error. I believe this is because the C:\Documents and Settings junction to C:\Users is now missing, and I cannot recreate this as it says 'file already exists' when I try:
mklink /J "D:\Users" "C:\Documents and Settings"
If I could get this back I think I could log in again.
I booted from recovery disk (Windows 8.1 ISO I downloaded from DreamSpark) and for at least five attempts I received this error: "To use system restore you must specify which windows installation to restore"
After finally being able to access system restore point I made immediately before attempting this for both drives, seemingly randomly after a number of reboot attempts, I am now receiving the following:
"System restore did not complete successfully. An unspecified error occured during system restore 0x800700b7"
EDIT: My system restore did complete successfully, contradictory to the error message. Only found this out because I missed the window to boot to disk and tried to log on out of habit...
I am at a loss. I thought if I messed this up as I have not done this before that having the recovery disk and a system restore point would prevent me from ending up in this situation, but apparently not! I understand mapping to E:\Users instead of B:\Users is the cause of this, but it doesn't explain my inability to carry out System Restore.
It's looking like I will have to do a clean reinstall but is there any way I can map these once and for all? This seems like so much effort for something so commonly needed.
