Lost Folders

[Potus5]

For some curious reason I have lost in LR the linkages to a number of my folders. For example, when I attempt to back up my LR catalog to an external drive the "choose" pull down menu in the catalogue backup routine does NOT display any of my external hard drives nor most of the seperate internal drives. All that is listed is a hierarchial list of my personal 'C' drive user folders like "My Pictures" and "My Music". Thus I cannot choose the external hard drive where I previously stored my catalog backups. Yet my computer itself recognizes these drives, when I clikc on the "Computer" or the "Windows Explorere" icons, all my internal and external drives are recognzied and listed.

Likewise, I only see the same folder structure as above, in LR when I run the import command and attempt to move or copy RAW images to an external hard drive. When I click on the "choose" pull down menu in the "copy to" listing for the "copy photos to a new location and add to catalog" command, none of my extrnal drives or internal drives are listed. All that is listed is the various 'user' folders like "My Pictures" and "My Music".

Any idea what has happened and how to fix the problem? I've tried rebooting the commputer and relaunching LR but to no avail in solving the problem.

I'm runing LR2.6 on a 4G RAM board, using Windows 7. The computer system and LR worked fine two weeks ago when leaving on a photo trip to Jordon I shut everything down - depowered the computer and the external drives. When I returned this week and repowered the unit, LR could not recognize any of my external drives or most of the internal ones. The assigned drive letters for all my external drives had been altered for some reason by the boot-up and LR could not find the external drive with the catalog. I had to copy the catalog to the internal system drive and have LR load it from there. And with none of the external drives being reconized or even listed with their new drive letters I cannot direct LR as to what drives it should access.

Appreciate any advice on this issue.

 

[Potus5]

TNG

Hi - just back from my meetings. Am holding off doing the LR uninstall/reinstall until we figure out what has happened with the profiles. BTW - I've call into my youngest daughter at university since I seem to vaguely recall her telling me at Christmas time that she had deleted her profile from the computer when she was back home for the holidays. I wonder if she went into Explorer to do the deletions rather than via the Account Management approach - am waiting on her return call.

 

[Jim Wilde]

Glenn,

Am guessing that your PC was originally running XP which was then upgraded to Vista which was then upgraded to Windows 7? The ASP.net Machine Account is an account created under XP by the .Net Framework 1.1, and so under Win7 it can safely be deleted. I would also suggest deleting the Margaret account, though this is probably disabled if you don’t see it as a Logon option. But don’t do anything yet...

Some of the funny things going on may be a legacy of the double-upgrade, far better with the benefit of my 2'/2' hindsight to maybe have done a clean install when going to Windows7. However, as we are where we are we need to try to clean things up a bit....but just in case there is a problem with your user profile I think it would be better to use the prime Administrator logon...if you can remember the password of course!

So first question of the day – do you remember the password of the Administrator account?

Second question: can I have another screenshot? Go to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Double click on Computer Management. In the panel which opens, click on the arrow at the LH side of the Local Users and Groups entry in the LH column, this will expand the item to show two individual entries - Users and Groups. Click on Users and in the main panel the list of existing users will be displayed, Administrator should be at the top. Can I have a screenshot of this list of users please?

Thanks...

 

[Potus5]

TNG

Thanks for the perservence on this !!!!! To answer your questions:
1. Yes, the upgrades ran from XP to Vista and then to Windows 7.
2. When I go to Control Panel/User Accounts/Manage Other Accounts - the only 'Administrator' accounts are my 'Glenn' account and the new 'Administrator 2' account I created this morning - I have passwords for both of these. I don't see any other Admin accounts listed, such as the 'original Administrator [what I may have done is sometime ago renamed that Administrator account with my name Glenn] - all the other acccounts listed are 'standard user' accounts.
2. BTW - my daughter did phone and said she had deleted her profile information by using the Windows Explorer to access the "User" folder and "manually removed the contents"; she did not use the Control Panel/accounts management approach. She was very unclear in her memory if she did any other changes to the profiles - "I recall I deleted listings and folders for music and photos, etc".
3. When I go to Control Panel/System and Security/Administrative Tools and double click on the right hand column listing for "Computer Management" I get LH column titled 'Computer Managemetn (Local) and under it a listing but nowhere do I see a term "Local Users and Groups" entry. I've attachyed a screen capture of the window.

 

[Jim Wilde]

Oh Dear...this isn't easy, is it? Presumably you are running Home Premium? I forgot that Local Users and Groups is not available in that version (for some reason best known to the folks at Redmond).

OK, can you give me a screenshot of the Manage Other Accounts display....

 

[Potus5]

Sorry - yes, Im running Windows Home Premium

There's the screen capture of the Control Panel/User Accounts/Manage Other Accounts display - attached.

 

[Jim Wilde]

OK, thanks for that.....I think some of my confusion is actually down to me forgetting the differences between Home Premium and Professional. May be things aren't as dire as I was beginning to think. There IS a way to logon as the Administrator account, but am a bit bothered by the fact you 'might have renamed it'....though I didn't think you could. Let's leave that for now.

Logged on as Glenn, suggest you go to Manage User Accounts and make the following changes:

1. Delete the ASP.net account
2. Delete the Margaret account if you don't think it will ever be used.
3. Delete the Administrator 2 account (am a bit bothered by the name, I don't want the OS getting confused).
4. Turn off the Guest Account (you should see this option when you select it under the Choose Account option).

At that point you should have two accounts, yours as the Administrator and Guest which will be disabled.

Now create another Administrator account, call it something like TNG but don't bother giving it a password as it's only temporary.

When all that's done, try logging off and logging on as TNG. If that works OK, then you can try running Lightroom again under TNG and see what happens....

Let me know if any of that is unclear or doesn't work as intended....

 

[Potus5]

Ugh!!!! Only partial success, as follows:
1. Logged on as Glenn, went to Control Panel/Manage User Accounts/Manage Other Account and saw the various accounts listed;
2. Successfully deleted the ASP.net account;
3. Successfully deleted the Margaret account;
4. Successfully deleted the Administrator 2 account;
5. Turned off the Guest Account.
6. Ended up with two accounts, Glenn as the Administrator and a Guest which indicated it was disabled.
7. Created another Administrator account - "TNG" - did not give it a password. At this point my Windows Explorer crashed for some reason and went into a restart mode. System did not seem to restart but maybe it did since I quickly ended up with a temporary 'blue screen of death' desktop and then my desktop came back relatively quickly BUT I had to then reclick on the Control Panel and reenter the Manage Accounts section. At this point the system was showing I had three accounts. Screen Capture attached.
8. Loged off as Glenn and tried to log on as TNG - but the TNG account did NOT show up in the start up menu list.
9. So I rebooted the computer.
1'. However, all that showed up on the desktop when the reboot completed was an icon for "Glenn" and an icon labled "Other User"!!! There were no log in icons for "Guest" nor for "TNG".
11. Yet when I log in again as Glenn and go to Control Panel/Manage other Account I see the same three accounts listed per the screen captured attached earlier - 'Glenn' as an administrator, 'TNG' as an administrator, and 'Guest' with the account noted as turned off.

Back in your hands!!!

Glenn

 

[Jim Wilde]

No worries, probably me just being a bit dense. Have you tried clicking on "Other User" instead of Glenn when you logon. Probably what will happen is another box will pop out with the option to select "TNG".

Try it!

 

[Potus5]

Ah!!! you're a genius - must be the air in West Sussex - it worked, at least in part:
1. you were right - click on the Othr User icon and got a fill-in-the-blans box asking for the name and password of the user. Typed in TNG and voila - got a MS screen stating "preparing desktop". When that completed there was a new desktop.
2. Clicked on the LR icon and LR started up. Went to 'File' and clicked on 'Open Catalog'. Sure enough it then gave me a choice to all my drives, went to my internal F drive and loaded up my Glenn's Master Catalog. When that finished it then asked me if I wanted to do a backup, and low and beyond in the 'Choices' pull down menu there were all of my drives - internal and external available as a choice for the location of the backup catalog. Backed it up to my Q drive with success. Then tested the import and it also worked - choice of any of my drives for the location of the imported images.
2. At this stage of course I could not use the MS Outlook to send you an e-mail since it was not configured for my server accounts.
3. So tried to 'switch users' and come back in as Glenn to give you the news. BUT, when I go to the 'switch users' pull down menue in the start menu corner of the desktop what is listed is TNG and 'Other User'. When I clikc on Other User I get a fill-in-the box asking for user name and password. When I enter 'Glenn' as the user and enter my password I get an error message "User name or password is incorrect."
4. Same thing when I log-off. I'm now given a screen with the log-in icons "TNG" and "Other User". With same results when I try to log in under the Other User as "Glenn".
5. YET in TNG when I go to the Control Panel/User Accounts I can see three accounts listed - TNG as an administrator, Glenn as an administrator, and Guest with the account noted as 'off'.
6. Same when I reboot - am given the log in options of TNG or Other User.
7. Result - can't seem to find my way back to logging in as Glenn - so had to start up my laptop and log in with it to to the forum in order send you this message.

But - nevertheless - we seem to be making progress!!!! At least LR itself appears to be OK when accessed via the computr's TNG user account!!!

 

[Jim Wilde]

Well, maybe a case of one step forward and two steps back!!!

If I remember, user-names as well as passwords are case sensitive, so obvious question is are you sure that you've entered everything correctly? I assume you have, in which case we may have a problem getting you back....but as I'm pretty sure the Glenn account has been corrupted that may not be too much of a problem. The biggest problem will be getting access to all your settings, and of course your data, e.g. your Outlook PST file. Question: how comprehensive is your backup process? In other words if we can't get you back as Glenn how much of a disaster would that be? Too late now, but I should have told you to take a backup before we started this....sorry!!

You mentioned earlier that you may have renamed the Administrator account....can you think about that and let me know for sure?

You could try entering Administrator as the user-name when clicking on Other User. For password you could try either leaving blank or your Glenn password.

Check those few things out while I'm having a think.....

 

[Potus5]

tried those various combiantions and none worked - HOWEVER I notice that under the TNG log-in when I go to Control Panel/Manage Usr Accounts that I can reset the password for Glenn, change the name of that account, etc. Of course - since TNG was set to have administrator priviledges. How about that approach - should I try resetting the Glenn password and/or its name?

Glenn

 

[Potus5]

TNG

forgot to respond to you question on backup - yes, I 'successfully' ran my Windows backup program on last Sunday and that backup is no my external P 'backup' drive. I quess I could run the 'restore' but can one do that under the TNG log in?

 

[Jim Wilde]

Can't think that it would make matters any worse! But do it one step at a time, i.e. try resetting the password first (ideally leave the new password blank for the time being). Try that first and let me know how you get on....the thing I don't know if if you'll need to enter a valid OLD password before you can enter a new one.

Let's leave the backup restore for know, it's just good to know that you have a fairly recent one available.

 

[Potus5]

OK here's the results:
1. I went in under the TNG log and via Control PAne/Manage Other Account rest the password for Glenn to a blank. Then tried via 'switch user' to log in using the "Glenn" name in the user name box and leaving the password box blank. It did not ask me for the old password. All I got was a error message that the user name or password is wrong. So then rebooted the computer and tried again to log in under "Other User" as Glenn with no password. Same results.
2. So then I reset the password for Glenn, with same result. Typing in the user name and the new password still did not get me log in when I tried the 'switch user' approach. BTW when I reset the new password under Manage Accounts the icon displayed in the Control Panel/Manage Other Accounts changed to read "Glenn" with "Administrator" and "Password Protected". The later phrase - "password protected" did not appear with the original icon. This suggests to me that the original Glenn log-in had no password protection and I recall that when I was originally logging in before all I was doing was clicking on the Glenn icon - the log in did not ask for a password. My mistake in thinking I had set one for it!!!!

3. So I then reset the icon via Manage User Accounts back to being blank, and tried logging in again via 'switch user'. Same result - get an error message that the "User name or password is wrong." This might suggest that dispite the icon for the account reading as "Glenn" and that name appearing in Manage Accounts menu that the name must be in error or is corrupted somehow/somewhere
4. I then tried logging in with the name "Administrator" and no password. Get an error message "Your account has been disabled. Please see your system administrator."

That's all I've tried so far - with the results noted above. I'm off to a dinner meeting tonight so when not get back to any nextg steps until later tonight - likely around 1' pm my time.

Glenn

 

[Potus5]

TNG

the initial sentence in point 3 above should have read "I reset the user password to being a blank", not the icon being a blank.

 

[Jim Wilde]

OK, interesting....and somewhat confusing.

One thing you could try is changing the NAME of the Glenn account....suggest something simple like all upper-case GLENN, again with no password and see if that changes things at all.

I'll catch up with you in the morning....if this renaming doesn't get your account back we'll have to try enabling the apparently disabled Administrator account....instructions to follow.

 

[Potus5]

OK - tried to change the name to GLENN [without any password] and got an error message that the change could not be completed because "there is an account with the same name". Then tried changing the account name to GLENN1 - system accepted the change BUT when I then tried to log in via 'switch users' I received another error message: "The user name or password is incorrect."

Glenn

 

[Jim Wilde]

OK, not so case sensitive as I thought! :-[

The fact that you can change the name and password, but still have it not recognised is sort of pointing to a corrupt profile....to be honest though I'm still concerned that there may be a bigger issue in your operating system, and so I'm a bit nervous about trying new things in case we are on a slippery slope and anything else we do may just make matters worse.

The biggest concern is getting access to your data that you had stored under the Glenn userid....Documents, Pictures, Music, etc...if we can get access to the main Administrator account that would put some of my concerns to rest, so perhaps we should try that first.

EDIT: before doing ANY of the below actions, could you just try one simple check? Logon as TNG and open the Windows Explorer, browse to Computer>Local Disk (C)>Users and click to expand the list. You should see a folder with the Glenn1 username, try clicking on that to see if you can open the folder (as an administrator you SHOULD be able to get access, though you may get a dialog box asking for you to "Continue" to get access permission). If this works and you can see all the Glenn1 folders then that would be great news and you can forget the rest below. Could you let me know what happens BEFORE we decide to use the following instructions? Thanks. (What I'm trying to do here is ensure we have acces to your data BEFORE we do something drastic - which I think we will end up doing anyway - such as deleting your original user account (because I think we agree it is corrupt in some way) and then rebuilding it....we need to copy the data/settings etc. to someplace where we can use it to rebuild a new account a step at a time).

DO NOT USE THE FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS UNTIL WE'VE DISCUSSED THE RESULTS OF THE ABOVE CHECK!

To enable the Administrator account, go to Start>All Programs>Accessories. Click on Accessories to expand the folder, then right-click on Command Prompt and select Run As Administrator. When the command prompt starts, you need to enter the following at the prompt:

net use administrator /active:yes

Enter that exactly as above, there are 3 spaces there, after net, after use and after administrator. There is not a space between the '/' and the word active. Check and double-check that you've entered the command correctly then press the return key to execute the command.

You should get the response "The command completed successfully" followed by a new prompt. If that happens just close the window, and reboot the computer.

IF at the logon screen you see the Administrator userid as an option, choose that and hopefully the system will build the account and we will be good to go sort out the problem.

IF on the other hand you get the choice between TNG and "Other User", select "Other User" and attempt to logon using the Administrator credentials (no password).

Any problems with any of the above, no doubt you'll let me know!!

BTW, not sure how much I'm going to be around during the day over here, will try to check in as and when I can, but definitely will be around from about 2''' my time (15'' yours)...

 

[Potus5]

TNG

OK - I'm off to some meetings this morning so will carry out your instructions when I get back - likely around 1':3' am my time.

BTW - a thought I had - I notice that when I look via Windows Explorer into my destop C and D drives [the computer with the issues] and go to the 'User' sub-directories that nowhere in either drive do I see a directory called 'Glenn' - what I see are directories with the names like "User" etc - In contrast to my laptop [running on XP] where I can see a directory with the name "Glenn". I wonder if the profile icon "Glenn" is actually pointing to one of these.

glenn

 

[Jim Wilde]

Interesting.....and it probably means you won't be able to do the first thing I wanted you to do!

First thing then....using Windows Explorer, browse to the C Drive, Users Folder, click to expand it so that we can see what user sub-folders are there and let me have a screenshot of the display? That would be a good starting point....

 

[Potus5]

OK - attached are the screen shoots of the User directories in Drives C - System and Drive D - Programs. This is taken from what shows up being logged in as TNG with administrator priviledges using Windows Explorer.

Glenn

 

[Jim Wilde]

Thanks Glenn. Re the Users folder on the D drive....I don't know what that is (possibly a hangover from your Vista days) but with a modified date of May last year we can discount that for the time being.

Going back to the C drive, therefore, you have 3 sets of user folders: Public (what used to be the "shared" folders which would be available to all users and any homegroup members), TNG (your current logon) and User. Looking at the last modified date, it would seem likely that "User" is in fact your Glenn(1) account which you renamed from "User" sometime in the past (when you rename a user account, the actual folder name is NOT renamed - this can cause lots of confusion). So what we need to do is to click on that "User" entry in Explorer on your C drive to see if it will expand as per the Public and TNG folders. If it does, we are in business! :fi_lone_ranger: If it doesn't we have to try something else. :icon_frown:

Have a go and let me have a screenshot if you can....

 

[Potus5]

Ureka!!! I tried my thought - while logged in as TNG I went to switch users and clicked on the icon labled "Other Users" - then in the fill in box for users name I typed in "User" without any password - and lo and behold was switched to my previous desktop for "Glenn".

So questions at this stage seem to be:
1. Why does the profile account "Glenn" not result in capacity to use in switch users the user name Glenn but instead requires the user name "User" to activite?
2. Why does the initial boot up desktop log in icons, when previous logged in as TNG only display two log in icons - a TNG one and a "Other Users" one?


Now that I have the GLENN desktop displayed am going to shut down the computer and restart - my theory is that this time the boot up display will show two icons only "Glenn" and "Other Users". If so then the 3rd question is:
3. Why does not the desktop display 3 log in icons - Glenn, TNG, and Other Users?

 

[Potus5]

TNG

So - now logged in with the Glenn destop here are the screen shots for the C and D drives with the expanded "User" folders displayed.
Question - why do the user profiles show up under both the C - System and D - Programs drives and is one of these sets [C or D] irrelevant?

 

[Jim Wilde]

Well done...that was one of the things I was going to suggest, but you beat me to it!!

Re your questions: I think the Logon screen only displaying the choice of "Last Logged On User" and "Other User" is possibly a 'feature' of Home Premium....on my Professional versions it doesn't work that way.

I really do not know why you need to enter "User" instead of Glenn when using the "Other User" option.....what happens now when you logon, does the logon screen give you "User" and "Other User" or do you get "Glenn" and "Other User"?

And as to why you have a Users folder on your D drive, sorry I really do not know....as I suggested it may be a legacy of Vista days.

Going forward, now that the panic to get access to the Glenn account is (for the moment) over, we can think about what to do next. Before making a final decision, however, it would be useful for you to conduct two further Lightroom tests:

1. Logged on as Glenn/User, try to launch Lightroom by double-clicking on your master catalog (i.e. repeating the test we did a couple of days ago). If the installer tries to start up, cancel it. If it doesn't, check to see if you have access to all your drives for import/backup purposes.

2. Log off (don't use Switch User), and logon as TNG and repeat the exercise.

I'm just wanting to make absolutely certain that there is still a difference in the way that Lightroom operates under the different user accounts.

Let me know what happens, and we can discuss what to do....