What does a status of "Backup" mean for Windows 7 local user profiles?

Question

Summary:

Upon logging on to Windows 7 RTM I get a message that my profile can't be loaded and a temporary user profile is created. I logged off and back on as Administrator. The user profiles dialog shows my user profile with a Type of "Local" and a Status of "Backup" rather than "Local" which it should be. How can I change this to make my user profile accessible?

The long story:

My PC has a single hard drive partitioned into a C: and a D:. I'd moved my user profile directory (c:\Users) to d:\Users, removed c:\Users and then used mklink.exe to create a directory symbolic link c:\Users --> d:\Users. Worked like a charm since I did it. Today, I make a System Restore Point for drives C: and D:. Next, I dismounted D: and used the Disk Management tool to remove the "D:" drive letter from the D volume. (My plan was to reboot and then redirect the symbolic link.) Upon reboot, I got the user profile error described above. Finally, I restored the System Restore Points that I'd created for both drives and then rebooted again. Same issue.

Solution

I did a file/directory comparison of the user profile to an existing known good profile and found that ntuser.dat wasn't in the broken one. It's not clear to me how the user hive was deleted as part of the steps above.

Comments

[Admin]

I had success with the actions at microitblog.com/micro-it-blog/2012/01/17/… THis point to microsoft at support.microsoft.com/kb/947215