The update (Fall Creators update, I think) appears to have wiped my pc. It also won’t let me role back to previous build because I have added an account. I haven’t. After the update it asked me to sign in with just my password, which I did. Has this created another account that is only letting me see a version of the system?
When I go into Accounts there appears to be only one – me as Administrator. I am loathe to delete that account in case I can’t sign back in at all.
I have tried System Restore – it couldn’t complete it (new build, I guess). I have a backup on an external drive but just wondered if everything is actually there – I just can’t see it.
Any help gratefully received.
Not my area of expertise but @Harold_Holt has given me useful computer advice in the past.
Edit – no idea why that link to him didn’t work. I put the underscore in and everything
@haroldholt
@harold holt
Nope.
It’s always a dash, NEVER an underscore.
@harold-holt
And no need for caps.
Mini to the rescue!
Again.
This has just caused me big paranoid panic.
I know the update installed overnight on Thursday, but have just spent the past half hour staring at a blank screen.
It then suddenly decided to come to life.
It may be crap advice but the answer might be leave it alone for a while and see what happens.
THIS would be my first thought. Some W10 updates chew the fat for a worryingly long time before waking back up again – to a certain extent it’s dependant upon the exact collection of hardware bits’n’bobs that make up your PC.
Mine took almost two hours to finish the installments but thankfully I haven’t experienced any major issues after this update. Spotify seems to think it’s offline when it isn’t, but I very rarely use it anyway, so I don’t worry about that. My photos all seem to be there still (last major update ate lots of photos and some documents, luckily I had copies on external hard drives and USBs).
If anything, it actually seems to have made my computer quicker, so that’s a plus.
The promised plethora of emojis ready to use at the push of a couple of buttons was a complete lie, however. 🙁
Sounds like you’re suffering from number 7 on this list: http://windowsreport.com/fall-creators-update-issues/
Thanks, but not quite. It has only asked me once. I’ll check the solutions here though.
There’s your local machine accounts which you have probably had for yonks, and there there’s a windows initiated Microsoft hosted account like Hotmail or outlook.com that ties your machine account to the cloud. I am at work at the moment and can’t remember how I disabled the link to the cloud, but if you are using Administrator it might be confused.
More recent editions of windows have been actively discouraging Administrator in favour of specific accounts, like ‘harold’. I think I went into user administration and cleared out the cloud link.
I haven’t heard of the update wiping PCs. Usually some minor grumbles not wholesale disaster. I’ve had a couple of machines young and old go through it ok too.
Hey @niallb, have a look at this… http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3574413/windows-fall-creator-update-1709-wiped-account.html
This whole thing is weird, given that I’ve updated both of my W10-capable laptops to the Fall Creators Update without any problems.
I did have several problems with one of them when first updating from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
It kept overheating and crashing (it’s a Toshiba, which are apparently notorious for overheating) whenever any load was put on the processor. Also kept completely losing the ability to open the Start Menu and having to reboot to get it back. After biting the bullet and doing a complete wipe of the hard drive, reinstalling W10 and reinstating my user settings and files from a backup it has behaved much better.
My other laptop (an HP one) has been upgraded from W8 through W8.1 to W10 and accepted the two Creators Updates with no problems, apart from a couple of niggles over Filetype associations being reset to Microsoft’s defaults and the power-saving settings also being reset to defaults.
Some PC hardware and software configurations just seem to react negatively to certain updates, it would seem.
But I won’t be buying Toshiba again, I reckon.
My desktop’s hard drive was rattling away for over an hour so I’m not surprised a laptop got hot. Then when it has finished the windows update it will re-index everything for the desktop search….I would expect that on pretty much any hardware. Even my external SSD gets hot when I thrash it with virtual machines.
Thanks for all of the suggestions. I deliberately left it alone yesterday, it was fuelling my depression. I’ll read the various links today and let you know how I get on.
Thanks again.
that link I mentioned above has a bunch of ideas *and* risk averse approaches. If you can, back up the bits that are still there before you go any further. And I am curious, has your data disappeared into the folder hierarchy mentioned in those comment threads, i.e. is it the correct scenario or has something else happened ?
I think one of the takeaways was make sure there’s another Administrator account you can log in as while you are trying to make the primary one work ok…so just create one with Admin rights. And then a restore point.
Using that hierarchy I found the folders under my original account username. I have created another Admin account and a restore point (major research needed to even understand what some of that meant, let alone how to do it.)
Next up, backing up what I can.
Well that’s great we seem to be in the right ballpark. Sorry there aren’t enough clues there. Let me know if you hit a wall.
Every Windows version since Windows 7 has a default System Administrator account that can be brought into play in emergencies.
While logged into another account, right-click the Start button and choose Windows Powershell (admin). Enter the password for your damaged Administrator account and then type the following command:
net user Administrator /active:yes
Pay attention to the spaces before the /.
Close the Powershell window, then log out.
You should see a new Administrator account appear on the login screen, so select this to log in (it’s not password-protected). Now go to Start>Settings>Accounts>Family & other people. Create yourself a new account and click “Change Account Type”, select “Administrator” and click “OK”.
Log out of the Administrator account and log into your new account. Click Start>Settings>Accounts>Your Info to verify it’s an administrator account. Right-click the Start button again, open another Powershell (admin) window and type:
net user Administrator /active:no
to disable the unsecured System Administrator account and then close the Powershell window again.
Once you’ve copied all the user files and settings from your old damaged account to the new one, you can delete the old account and change it’s name to the same as the old one if you want to.
Thanks so much for your help.
Does the solution in that link mean typing ‘regedit’ into the search box and then typing his path, starting HKEY_LOCAL ? Is changing the image path he describes as simple as retyping the one for the ‘old account ‘ with the one that Microsoft have replaced it with?
Re-edit is just an application you launch, like notepad. And when you find the profile entry (see below) the modify window is just a free text field you can fill in, editing the existing value and saving it.
Bloody spell checker. Regedit is an app you launch when you type it’s name into the search bar and choose it from the Start menu list….
Yes, but using regedit is one of the riskier moves. It opens an editor and you navigate a tree hierarchy for system settings, user settings and so on. You might expand one branch of the tree and see hundreds of entries so be patient. When you find the folder you want and see the registry item in the right hand window, right click on the item you need to change and there’ll be a Modify option which opens an edit windows.
You have to be very careful what you put in there though. Make sure it’s exactly what was instructed, case and all. Maybe make a note of what was there before too.
When you get into HKLOCAL\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\windows nt\currentversion\profilelist, you will probably see a cryptic list of folders. As you click each one look at the registry items on the right and one of them should be the profileimagepath item you need to change.
There are ways to save the registry settings to be able to restore if there’s an issue. The Export option in the File menu drop down let’s you save the registry to a file that you can import later.
Hey @niallb – should I keep my extremities crossed, or does the silence mean that all is now completely cactus ?
Going to try this evening. I use the PC for work as well so I’m loathe to try any changes during the day in case it screws all of that up as well.
Didn’t work. If I import the registry file from my external drive will that ‘repair ‘ the changes I made?
Does @Mike-H solution sound easier?
That’s a major bummer. Either import the registry or go back to the restore point. Restore point probably easier but slower.
What did you see? What did you put in the regedit windows?
Regedit scares the shit out of me. Not so bad changing one or two keys in a session if you’re very, very careful with your spelling, punctuation, spaces in the lines etc. but so easy to end up with an un-bootable computer if you’re careless.
Hey @niallb – I should have responded to your actual question…@Mike_H ‘s solution seems feasible, but it might be a long trek if there’s data in a lot of places, and it might depend on a few things, like do you use encryption (I’m betting not), and are there a lot of files with permissions tied to the original account (again probably not). Worst case you could try creating a new account with those copied assets and see if it works…you don’t have to delete the originals.
I tend not to use the default ‘documents’, ‘music’ or ‘pictures’ folders for this very reason, I have always habitually put them in my own folders under the C drive that can be seen by anyone with an account on the machine. In particular the shared ‘music’ folder stopped my wife and kids ripping the same material multiple times. Doesn’t help you solve the problem though (sorry).
@harold-holt I am ‘rebuilding ‘ on the extra Admin account I created. I’ve copied everything except photos and music so far, and all seems okay. The last 2 are going to be tricky because they are huge files and there’s not enough space to have duplicate files at the same time. My Big consolation is my precious iPod Classic ( I bought a spare one the day they announced they were stopping production. The price nearly doubled on Amazon the next day). I’m doing some research to see how easy/satisfactory it is to reload iTunes from an iPod. The bottom line I’ll have to face is that I’ll have to delete the music on the PC at some point, which terrifies me.