Windows 10 Problems .

[swarfendor437 14]

Family member at Uni has an Asus Zen Notebook with 256 Gb SSD and 1 TB hard drive. The latter is the Data drive but no sizes of file are showing - contains Acronis image backup and some other folders and only 4.96 Gb left. Disk clean up states "Cleanup 0Kb of System files to be removed from D drive.

 

Also her user account name does not show - now has default0, Public, Super - the latter appears to be where all her personal files are but no mappings to D.

 

Have looked on line and can't find anything similar other than 'how to rename accounts'. For some bizarre reason, security seemed to have been switched off - updated and scanned - no issues. Same for Malwarebytes and Super Anti-Spyware.

 

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Edited November 10, 2019 by swarfendor437

[Ghozer 112]

I'd have to see it in front of me really..
But it sounds as though either they have had a corrupted user account profile, and it's reset/rebuilt it, or someones been messing with something they shouldn't have

- try, creating a new administrator account - making sure you have "View all files" enabled will show hidden files and folders then)

 

and try a search for a document name she can remember, or even just the old username (if she can remember it)

the user may have X:\Users\USERNAME\  (C or D drive) that they cannot access as they are not the 'owner'

if you find the users files/folders, you will have to change the permissions to reclaim them, back them up, reformat/reinstall and put files back... 

I wouldn't try and 'fix' the issue and let her use it, find/backup files and start fresh

[swarfendor437 14]

Thanks for the reply Ghozer - the user name shows up in the 'Logout/Shutdown' bit of the menu and also login - it's just the users listed. No chance of it being hacked do you think? I can't remember how big the Acronis Image 2018 was. Haven't checked if they can access the Libraries files - will look at that and see what's what. I will suggest getting a free Box Account and saving stuff to that also. Thanks again.

[swarfendor437 14]

OK, managed to hack the BIOS and boot Makulu Linux in live mode. What was interesting was that Makulu read what was in the Data drive (in Windows it was the name of the Serial tag of the machine that held all folders files but little else information). I had installed Acronis True Image Home 2018 when new. Makulu reported 'backupset[dd.mm.yyyy] - so what was happening was I thought some auto backup procedure set by Acronis. However if that were the case I could not have seen the backupsets in Windows after I had set the BIOS back to normal to boot Windows 10 Home 64-bit when on right-clicking the hash tag folder it asked if I wanted to delete Windows Image backup files! Which I did apart from the first one and then about 5 from July of this year I left intact so the hard drive has 500 Gb of space.

 

I noticed something else peculiar. D:\ is supposed to be Data which it is but there was some strange (to me) recursive links to users Documents and Settings back to C then back to D again when following the trail! Bizarre!

[zach 234]

Swarf, was there any kind of TPM installed or Windows Bitlocker turned on, on her machine?

Also, at any point did she forget her password and maybe put the wrong one in a few times?

Did she change from a local to an MS linked account (That has been known to change the user folder name but all the files are there and useable)

Did the "recursive links" have a $ symbol after the name?

 

It is an odd one and as Ghozer said, it would be best to have it in front of you. When Windows 10 first installs it always gives the PC an odd name after initial install, just change it later if you want...I always do as the names mean nothing on a network view! Although I no longer use Acronis, I never had any issues with the software but I notice from their emails that they moved to system optimizers and backup etc, it's possible Acronis is doing lots of full backups instead of incremental type, that would use a lot of space. Some backup software can create a partition on the HDD, I've seen this cause issues for some users too. Does everything look OK in disk Management?

 

Would it be an option for her to backup her personal files and clean install again? I know it sounds a bit drastic but it can be the best option in some cases.

[swarfendor437 14]

Hi zach, no it's just been full name, no hotmail or outlook logins. No account lockouts etc. What I found confusing is that the backupsets were accessible through the Windows Imaging Application as Acronis also used its own way of doing things separate to Windows - whether it was down to an update causing autobackups I don't know. Anyhoo, it appears to be OK and I can check from time to time it is behaving itself. Acronis updated itself to 2019 which surprised me, but then perhaps not because soon after it was offering Black Friday discounts for their 2020 release! LOL! Was interested to note though that in 2019 release it now also includes ransomware protection. I think where I went wrong in one respect was I didn't check how the image was labelled on the backup 1 TB portable Buffalo drive that was used to create the first Acronis image - that might have given me the definitive answer! Thanks for the suggestions though.

[zach 234]

No problem. The main thing in any of these cases is that people don't lose files that can't be replaced.