files missing after copying to computer

mediopolis

New Member
Messages
3
Hi everyone,

I am running into an issue I have never seen. I had a friends laptop that i was upgrading from windows 7. I took out his hard drive and plugged it into my windows 8 machine and backed up the files to my pc and then formatted and installed windows 8.

Once I got it all back up i setup the user profile Matt and then took the hard drive back out the laptop and plugged it into my machine to copy the (my docs, my music, my photos, etc.) back to the laptop drive. So i sat and waited for 2 hours while it copied 100GB back to the laptop drive. Once it finished i plugged the drive back into the laptop and when i booted into windows 8, non of the files appear... Nothing!

The computer doesnt even register that i copied 100GB onto the hard drive. It shows only that i am using 30GB of the 500GB drive which is not the case. When i took the drive out and plugged it into my machine to test, everything showed up as it was. So I confirmed i did copy the 100GB to the laptop drive. But when i put it back into the laptop, nothing shows up...

What could be causing this to happen? Is is because when i had it hooked to my desktop (windows 8) it was using my profile and hid the files? I am stumped... any help would be great.

on a side note... when i goto the bottom left start square that pops up.. and i right click on it. None of the (computer management, device manager, event viewer, etc.) options don't appear. Could the profile be corrupt?

Thanks.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    win 8
Hi there, i know this is frustrating but I have a few questions first..

Can you verify that his data is in your backup folder and is complete?

Where did you copy his backed up data to?

Did you use windows explorer or another program to copy the files?

Copying files to system folders like MY DOCUMENTS, MY PICTURES, etc.. can be tricky

Its possible you may have copied them to the shortcut of MY DOCUMENTS which will actually copy it to YOUR MY DOCUMENTS because the system sees those shortcuts as %USERPROFILE%\My Documents instead of D:\user\my documents for example.

The difference being one is on the system's drive and the other on a different drive.

Check your folders to see if they have been copied there instead.

To see his actual drive from your computer, the path will be (drive:)\Users\Matt\My Documents..... etc..

If you go to his drive from your computer and just click MY DOCUMENTS, you will be looking at yours..

Let us know what youve found, and well get his data back where it belongs..


 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 & Windows 7 Dual Boot
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    HP G60
    CPU
    AMD Turion RM-70 Dual Core 2.0 GHZ
    Memory
    3 GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    Nvidia GeForce 8200M G
    Screen Resolution
    1366 x 768
    Mouse
    MS Intellipoint 5 button (love it!)
    Browser
    Chrome and Chromium
    Antivirus
    Avast Free & Malwarebytes
ok. I think it has completely changed the permissions. It looks like the user "matt" that i setup had its permissions removed from everything. and i mean everything. Even when i started to boot into window 8 and the metro screen came up... it does not even show the tiles from the profile. Just a blank screen which none of the charm bar options worked, except to shutdown and restart.

I put in a usb stick to reformat windows again and it popped up the windows "what do you want to do" and i was able to open the usb drive with the windows explorer. Now, it brought me back to the desktop and when i tried to click on the c:\ it says i have no permissions to open c:\

so it's like it locked out the "matt" profile completely. Man this is weird, and i have done this procedure probably a million times with other computers with no problem.

To answer you questions....

1)I used windows explorer to copy the files...
2) i am looking on my desktop and see his files i backed up just fine
3) i copied his data from the laptop drive to one of my spare 4TB drives on my desktop that had nothing on it
4) when i copied the files back to his pc, i sent them to c:\users\matt\my pictures, etc.

also, when i also copied a duplicate back to the laptop root c:\ just to make sure it did not go into any user profile. And when i booted into windows, not even the folder with files i made on the c:\ showed up.

I am going to make another user profile real quick and see what happens when i boot into that. It will be an admin profile also. If that doesn't work, i am going to reformat quickly and start this process from scratch, but instead of pulling the laptop drive out and hooking it to my desktop. I will just copy the files back to the laptop over the network via a mapped drive.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    win 8
Youre doing everythying perfectly, please let us know what the problem was and how you fixed it.

Im confident you can get it done..
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 & Windows 7 Dual Boot
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    HP G60
    CPU
    AMD Turion RM-70 Dual Core 2.0 GHZ
    Memory
    3 GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    Nvidia GeForce 8200M G
    Screen Resolution
    1366 x 768
    Mouse
    MS Intellipoint 5 button (love it!)
    Browser
    Chrome and Chromium
    Antivirus
    Avast Free & Malwarebytes
Ok, I just reformatted the laptop pc. I am typing on it now actually...

A weird thing happened. When i restarted the pc before i reformatted, windows started to repair the HDD and when windows booted, i was able to see the metro screen with icons. I still could not access the c:\. So i right clicked and went into advanced permissions and tried to reassign everything back to the "Administrators" group. That did nothing. So rather than just beat my head against the wall. A quick reformat was the best option i suppose.

For anyone else out there, be careful hooking up a HDD with windows 8 on it to another computer with windows 8 as a slave drive. And copying files from one to the other from the c:\users\profiles area. Whatever happened, the permissions from the desktop eradicated the permissions on the laptop drive somehow. I have never seen it do that before with a few hundred windows 8 pc setups i have done.

I am now copying the data over the network to this computers C:\DATA folder i made for temp. Then I will just move the data into their respective folder once it finishes.

Learn something new everyday... Thanks for the help Brooklyn567 ;)
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    win 8
No problem, I knew that you would get it done by the detail and accuracy of the procedure you explained to me...

Its just one of those things that can only get resolved by getting your hands into it, and catching it when it happens..

I was going to attempt to duplicate what you wanted to do to try and see where its going wrong, but thankfully you figured it out..

Thanks again for posting the procedure, it will help others in similar situations..
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 & Windows 7 Dual Boot
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    HP G60
    CPU
    AMD Turion RM-70 Dual Core 2.0 GHZ
    Memory
    3 GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    Nvidia GeForce 8200M G
    Screen Resolution
    1366 x 768
    Mouse
    MS Intellipoint 5 button (love it!)
    Browser
    Chrome and Chromium
    Antivirus
    Avast Free & Malwarebytes
Back
Top