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Getting into W10 safe mode with corrupted admin profile

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Here's a fun one. I had to restore a system backup today that must've had something wrong with it because although I can boot just fine, when I try to sign in I get the message:

The User Profile Service failed the sign-in. The user profile cannot be loaded.

So I assume there's something wrong with that profile... something I could maybe fix in safe mode.

Problem is... it's my admin account and obviously if I can't get into that I can't get any further whether I boot into safe mode or not. Still gotta login.

Any way around this or am I just boned?

I also have another image taken just before I loaded this one that I can try. See... the reason I had to resort to this in the first place was to save a damned mod setup after my mod software threw its intricate config data into a black hole... basically rendering the entire thing irrecoverable. I tried to pull them from the abyss to no avail. Opted to dump this backup because I didn't want to lose the time put in. I'll put it this way... if I put 3 straight days and nights into trying to save it, it wouldn't put a dent in the time spent setting up in the first place. If I can't recover it there will never be any going back to how it was.

So it's either try to fix this or boot Linux via USB to pull the good files from what's on the drive now (assuming they aren't also corrupted) and then do the fresh install... or try to pull my second backup and copy the old files back in. Either way...

Which... it may come down to that anyway. I'm not sure if the backup is corrupted or not. The image verified so I'm thinking easeus' 'system backup' might just be rotten. If I go the route of pulling the files before swapping for another image, I'll know for sure.

Either way, I'll probably never touch thier software again. That's for sure!:laugh: I knew I was in for a ride when it decided that C: was old hat for system partitions and instead designated it as A: haha. Windows at least caught that when it ran its pre-boot check, though. I've never seen such wonky behavior from this software before. I'm learning so much! :rolleyes:

It just seems crazy to me that if your only Win10 admin account gets corrupted there's no way to fix it. It's rediculous that something like that could make the system irreparably inoperable. Doesn't it keep a backup of user profiles? I know 7 did. But then... how would I access that and swap them if I can't login.

I'm just at a total loss as to how to get around it. Any ideas? Anything dumb that might cause this?
 
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hat

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I read a post once, I believe by our own @newtekie1 involving a way to bring up a command prompt by manipulating the Ease of Access button, which you have access to on the login page. I think you're supposed to rename the Ease of Access executable, make a copy of the command prompt executable, and rename it to whatever name the Ease of Access executable had. Doing this calls the command prompt rather than the Ease of Access thing, and from there you can enable the hidden Administrator account.
 
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Welp... turns out I can actually get my credentials to give me admin cmd... and it accepted the command to enable the hidden administrator account. No Jacky tricks needed... I can do it straight from the recovery menu.

But this actually makes me thing the install is borked... because I'm still unable to login to it. I don't have the option to switch to it on the startup screen. Something else going on there.

Say you've been invited to a house party by an acquaintance. You don't really want to go but for some reason you agree. And then as you are walking up to ring the doorbell you realize there's no music, no people talking, no cars outside... and now you're catching the scent of death and decay. Faint but unmistakable.

That's when you quit your job and leave town. You don't dare try the doorbell.

Time to load up Linux on a flash drive and look at what's actually there....


EDIT: A little update... rooting through the files on the drive I find no signs of corruption. I pulled a storage backup from the same software and there is perfect parity.

I think Easus somehow screwed up either taking the backup or applying it. I mean... it has worked for cloning and pulling system backups just fine for me many times before. I didn't do it any differently from before. But it seems that even though the non-system files on the drive are fine, the system is not. My understanding of this is rudimentary but I would assume that when it's specifically backing up a system drive it has to build an itenerary of some sort to deploy the install properly, with windows 10 being a little more complex in that regard. Not your everyday sector by sector affair. I think that part of the backup must be bad. Wherever those records were got shook up. Somehow I'm doubting the issues with the OS are limited to just this. I can't find a damned thing about it. Apparently it just doesn't happen unless you're as dumb as me! :laugh:

So here I am... copying the files I was after off of this failed backup and hoping the manual backup does better. Like a regular jagoff.
 
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eidairaman1

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@Solaris17 you think the Admin profile needs rebuilding?
 
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Welp easeus' officially goes on my list. The second backup, once loaded, won't even finish booting... just goes to a blank screen no matter what I try. Pretty disappointed in them at this point. First and second time their backups have totally failed me... one right after other! That's pretty spooky! Should I go ahead and start building a backup server that uses two different backup programs? To go on top of these? :laugh:

Two system backups with different problems... the question is which do I try to troubleshoot tomorrow... ...I think tonight I'll format the drive manually and try deploying it sector by sector, since I also have that option.


Okay... so messing around with a recovery stick I see that startup repair is failing and dumping the logs on the E: drive. So I've gone from letter A to letter E for my system partitions now. Makes about as much sense as anything. Is it just not actually formatting the drive at all before dumping the backup? It seems to be trying really hard not to designate the proper drive letter. Anything but C...

But then from the EaseUS disk, it's coming up as C again... also there is no 'E:' drive connected so there's that.

Safe to assume neither of these backups are worth bothering with? Just doesn't seem like there's much that can be done with such obvious signs of corruption. Basically all I really CAN do is access the system files from Linux, where I can see everything appears to be intact. I don't get this. I thought maybe it was a video driver issue. Can't really properly get in to fix that... or anything else. So I tried swapping cards to no avail. Tried swapping from DP to HDMI. I get no display after a certain point with that spinning circle. I can't get into safe mode. Looks like I can run the command prompt from the W10 recovery drive but that's really it. Wouldn't even know where to start, there.

Which reminds me... a little voice keeps whispering to me "You could have fixed this if it were Linux." And then a bigger part of me is all like "BUUUT MUH VIDYA GAAAAAAMMES!!!"

Stuff like this makes me long for a day when I can fully switch to Linux once again.
 
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Easy fix, can you login with a non admin profile?

If not use cmd to make a new profile, login, open regedit then browse to the profiles and drlte the key for your profile
 
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Easy fix, can you login with a non admin profile?

If not use cmd to make a new profile, login, open regedit then browse to the profiles and drlte the key for your profile
Ahhh if only. Just go through trying that actually... decided to let the old backup on while I was at work. Something else is definitely wrong. I don't think it's able to properly run through a login sequence in the first place. Even password recovery is broken. As in, even after making a local standard-level account, knowing the password, I can neither login nor run password recovery. It spits out that same error either way.

I'm sure there's a way to fix it, but the more I poke at it, the more it becomes a dark rabbit hole. Too many things going wrong immediately. It's probably going to be faster for me to get going with a fresh install. Who knows? It's possible that old install had just had enough :rolleyes: Maybe EaseUS has seen this before I can point me to exactly what happened, but is it worth waiting around and stabbing in the dark to maybe figure it out at some point in time? Nah.
 
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Ahhh if only. Just go through trying that actually... decided to let the old backup on while I was at work. Something else is definitely wrong. I don't think it's able to properly run through a login sequence in the first place. Even password recovery is broken. As in, even after making a local standard-level account, knowing the password, I can neither login nor run password recovery. It spits out that same error either way.

I'm sure there's a way to fix it, but the more I poke at it, the more it becomes a dark rabbit hole. Too many things going wrong immediately. It's probably going to be faster for me to get going with a fresh install. Who knows? It's possible that old install had just had enough :rolleyes: Maybe EaseUS has seen this before I can point me to exactly what happened, but is it worth waiting around and stabbing in the dark to maybe figure it out at some point in time? Nah.

In your shoes I'd pull out my thumb drive and reimage
 
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In your shoes I'd pull out my thumb drive and reimage
Not a bad way to go. Opted for the full clean install in this case because I'm a superstitious bastard and honestly I haven't done one in 2 years... 2 years of cloning and messing around with it, which seems more than some people. It's time to correct all of the little things that piled up, rethink my setup, buy another backup drive, etc... :laugh:

Not how I wanted things to go, but no major loss. One thing that really helps... EaseUS Todo Backup has the ability to mount your backup images so you can access the files. I would have done this before, but it never worked on the old install... newest version of the app, too. Now it does, so I can pretty easily pluck whatever I wanna keep and such.

I will say it is times like these I'm glad I run multiple drives and generally only keep my OS and baseline software on the C: drive. The only reason I kept this game on there is because Fallout 4 is one of the few games where loading from the fastest drive you have is a must for load times, due to problems with the engine. We're talking the difference between a couple of minutes and less than half of one sometimes. So I put it on my nvme system drive. The mod manager uses hardlinks to deploy, so it all has to go on that same drive. Other than that, I'm only losing some programs and obviously configurations... and even that, not so much because again I have do have all of the old files on those backup images, so I can drop in the old config files for any app that supports it... when I even need to, because my appdata folder is on my storage drive alongside all of my personal files.

It all cost me nothing but time... but what a pain! I really don't like Windows 10 when it comes to stuff like this. Maybe it's just me, but I've never had good luck troubleshooting or doing major things with it. It's like either it works or it doesn't and there's not much you can do about it but roll back... and usually it's for things where that wouldn't be necessary if the access and/or control were allowed. Maybe it's because I 'learned' and predominantly used linux from my teenage years to most of my adulthood, but I don't find it to be troubleshooting friendly by comparison. Often trivial problems can wreak havoc and the solutions (if there are any) are absurdly convoluted and take you through all of this convoluted interlocking crap that you may just undermine trying to fix the original thing.

It's like... awesome when it works, nightmare when it doesn't. Mostly it works and is a great experience, but only when it comes to things it 'expects' you to do. Really rigid under the hood compared to what I'm most used to with linux, where you can pretty easily get in and change anything you need to, even when you can't boot from the system partition! You don't have to hope that the capability to alter something you need to get at was considered and built in. It is already possible fundamentally, if you're willing to do some research and try to understand how the underlying systems work, most times. Every little thing doesn't need to be considered. If what you need to do isn't there, you can add it, or tell the OS how to do it yourself.

Case in point... I guess they've decided to use the first 5 letters of your name for your user folder, now. Or maybe it's because I started my last install with a local account instead of a linked one. I would have liked to change this as my name isn't 'micha' and having it changed from the original 'mike' of my old system causes hiccups with my migration. But changing it is total nonsense for what it actually amounts to. I always find myself dealing with stupid little things like that with this OS. I ended up creating a symlink so things looking for the old folder get pointed to the one Windows decided I should have instead. instead of doing it the 'proper' way, which already feels like a jerry rig most times. My biggest problem is that there's not enough consideration for different situations that can happen under the hood with different setups. If you're anything but a basic user, that can bite you hard.
 
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