After a whole night of experimenting I could successfully upgrade to 8.1 on a machine where the ProfilesDirectory was redirected to D:\Users and the user folder was also D:\Users\Username.
Beware: I also tried roughly the same on a different computer without luck (but it had low on free space) and after doing the update and restarted several times, it stuck at 59% and when I forced the shutdown, it rolled back automatically to Windows 8,
but the profile directory cannot be loaded since then, every time when I log on, a temporary directory is created.
The steps I made for the successful upgrade:
(I am not sure if all these are required but this worked for me)
- I reset HKLM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/ProfileList/ProfilesDirectory back to "%SystemDrive%\Users".
- I created a new account (after the first step it will be created in C:\Users )
- I made the new account Administrator (Control panel, change user type)
- I signed out with my existing user
- I signed in with the newly created user
- I opened an administrator command prompt and made a Junction from the C: profile folders to the D: profile folders running mklink /J C:\Users\Username D:\Users\Username
- I changed the HKLM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/ProfileList/S-1-5-xx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ProfileImagePath keys that point to D:\Users\Username to C:\Users\Username
- Verified that I could still log in to desktop with the user.
- (I guess the previous 3 steps should be repeated for all the accounts with profile folders on D)
- Installed all pending updates and made a full restart to make sure that the no user on D is logged in
- Downloaded and installed the 8.1 update successfully :-) .
Actually I tried to install the update after the previous steps too but it was unsuccessful. At first, it failed with the error message "Can't update to Windows 8.1 Sorry, it looks like this PC can't run Windows 8.1. This might be because the Users or
Program Files folder is being redirected to another parititon" during compatibility check.
After changing the ProfilesDirectory, the error was different, the progress indicator in Windows Store went to something like 95% and then it just gave an error number. (I can't remember it but something like 700040001, it had only 3 nonzero digits)
At the end, after installing all updates and a full restart, the update went successfully.
Playing around with the ProfileImagePaths doesn't seem to be very safe, I don't know when the user account went wrong in the other case, I can't remember signing back in after doing the registry changes, so it might have been wrong before the 8.1 upgrade.
It might have been the case of the failure to upgrade.
I have no idea what I did differently apart from the new user I created was a local account and not a microsoft account.
Actually the same thing happened to me sometimes when I tried to relocate an existing account to a different drive in the past (Win XP, Win 7), but after that my strategy was to create a temporary account when installing windows, then change ProfilesDirectory
and for the accounts I created after that were created on D:. This led to the setup that made Windows 8.1 upgrade fail.
Note: It happened to me previously that an update failed for the same reason, but that time it was enough to do the first step on my list and I didn't have to touch my existing profiles.
It also occurred to me that probably the Junction and changing ProfileImagePaths was unnecessary and the reason of the failure after changed ProfilesDirectory was not that would have to install the pending 3 updates and do a clean restart.
I hope that this helps, at least there is a case when the upgrade was solved without doing a full reinstall or deleting users.
I hope deleting and recreating the user will work in my other case as well.
I also have the suspicion that after upgrading to 8.1 I would be able to put the default profiles dir back to D: (until Windows 8.2, Windows 9 or a SP comes out)
