Help me help my wife

[J T]

So, my wife backed up her hard drive the other night. We use Vista 64 home premium. Unfortunately, when she moved the folders from her 'user name' folder, she accidentally told it to cut, instead of copy. Now, we moved everything back, and there is a problem. Vista now believes that everything it should be pointing to is on the external hard drive (F:) instead of her main hard drive (C:). If the external drive is unplugged, every time you open a windows explorer window it gives a message saying:

"F:/Desktop refers to a location that is unavailable..."


If I plug the external drive back in, I stop getting this message. Somehow Vista is always pointing Explorer to her external drive somehow, but I don't know how to stop this. Any ideas for a solution?

[gtmtnbiker]

I suggest copying her stuff to a different location. Then I would delete her user account and then recreate it.

[J T]

I should add a few trouble shooting things that didn't work:

System restore is useless because it apparently only has restore points AFTER the problem started yesterd (WTF?).

Also, I noticed that quick links in the Start menu like 'Documents' 'Music' 'Pictures' were pointing to the F: drive, so I went into properties and set them to point to their defaults on the C: drive. Still, when I open up explorer, on the left I see duplicates of these folders under her user name, like 'Documents' 'Documents' 'Music' 'Music'. If I try to delete them though, they will delete the backups from the external drive.

[dlmvii]

Not sure if this is what you mean, but according to here - http://joshmouch.wordpress.com/2007/04/ ... -in-vista/

The value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList is where windows looks for the user directory, so if you change that from F:\ to C:\Users\ or whatever maybe that will fix it.

[J T]

Thanks guys!

I managed to fix this, though I did it by redirecting the location of the every folder in her user account list to its default. It turns out I had only partly done that before, and since the 'desktop' folder is in there, every action on the computer was wigging out.

I think your solutions would have worked too, so thanks. I actually did have REGEDIT open for a minute and then I was like... naw, I think I'll try a few more things before I mess with the registry. That always makes me nervous.

What a mess though! I had to redirect i-Tunes and lost all her album artwork in the process, then had to restore to an older version of the i-Tunes library.

It's all back to normal though. I appreciate the help.

[Niode]

The joys of Windows

[illiriks]

This reminds me why I use BSD