[SOLVED] Moving user folders disaster

[Larry Sabo]

Customer has a new PC with a 250GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, and created his account ready for me to restore data from his old PC to the new PC's HDD (d: drive). I backed up his profile from an old PC to the HDD on the new PC using Fabs, then restored it from there to his new profile on c:. So far so good. (I wanted to keep the Fabs backup and a copy of another old partition from the old PC on d: until all was finished.)

The customer's work order asked that his data be restored to the new PC's HDD and I figured he is never going to find his way around the Fabs back-up folder so I relocated the Documents folder from Quick access Documents to d:\ by right-clicking the Documents folder, Properties, Location, Move, navigating to d:\ and clicking OK. Rather than create a new Documents folder on d: and leaving alone what I had put there, it moved the contents of Documents to the root of d:\ and deleted what was there before the relocation. WTF!

When I click on d: then Properties, Location and Restore Default, it fills in the path to the original location and when I click OK I get the prompt about old and new location paths and click OK, I get "The document can't be moved here. Failed to build the list of regular subdirectories under d:\System Volume Information." System restore to prior to the above is of no help. It looks like I'll have to create a new profile and start over.

Anyone else have this happen to them? Where did I go wrong?

EDIT: Disregard please -- I should have created the new folders before relocating the user profile folder into that, not the root of d:

 

[carmen617]

Not sure where you went wrong, but when I relocate the Documents, Desktop, etc folders to d on those kinds of systems, I always take the most conservative, long approach. First I go to D, create a file for the user (fi there is more than one user on the system) and create empty Documents, Desktop, etc folders there. Then I go back to C and drill down to c:\users\username to relocate the folders.

 

[HCHTech]

Yeah, I think I've always done it the same way as @carmen617. I've never tested this process' ability to create a target directory if none exists.

 

[GTP]

This ^^
I do the same as @carmen617 .
I've ended up with the same kinds of issues as @Larry Sabo aluded to above.
I had a prortable program that I employed to do this and it worked a treat, but FML I cant remember what it was called, or where it is now.
It worked like Steam Mover but with user folders.

 

[fincoder]

In the folder's Location tab I just enter d:\Documents, press OK, then Yes to have the folder created for me, then Yes to have files moved. I think Larry's issue might have been due to trying to move Documents to the d: root.

There's a quick way of doing this if multiple profile folders are to be moved. I've done this plenty of times without ever a problem:
Go to c:\users\username, select the folders to be moved, right-click-drag and drop on d:, from the drag-context menu select Move.