Windows 10: User Profile Folder Goes Invisible in W11 Pro

I created a C:\Users\xxx user profile folder for my Microsoft account. It worked fine. I could see all of the subfolders provided by Windows like Display, Documents, etc. After a day or so, C:\Users\xxx went invisible, but my desktop PC continues to boot up and work fine, but I could no longer see C:\Users\xxx. I am able to see C:\Users\Public and another Windows standard user profile folder and another user profile folder that I created. I know C:\Users\xxx still exists because I can go to the Command Prompt and use cd C:\Users\xxx to get to that directory, then use dir to see all of the

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User Profile Service failed

To resolve your concern, we suggest that you follow these steps:

• Copy the Default folder (in C:\Users) from another windows 10 computer.
• Rename the Default folder to something like DefaultOLD (just to keep it for safety reasons).
  
• Paste it in your Users folder.
• To make sure that you won't have problems with permissions of the "implant" folder, just transfer it via a FAT/FAT32 formatted USB stick (those filesystems don't have permissions).

This will provide solution to the error User Profile Service failed.

Let us know if you need more assistance.

 

Hide or Show User Profile's Personal Folders in Navigation Pane

Hello Brink and thank you. This website is a very helpful resource.

Your suggested answer will hide the User Profile folder in the Navigation Pane.

Instead, this scenario involves not hiding the User Profile folder but hiding specific Personal Folders in the Navigation Pane that are marked "Hidden" in the Files/Folders Listing Area.

My suspicion is that there are more "PinToNamespace" registry entries for me to toggle the DWORD value.

 

Move Users Folder Location in Windows 10  

If not the best way to do that but at least the way I recommend:

• "Empty" your user profile folders as much as you can, copying documents, pics, videos, music and all other personal data from all user profiles to external HDD. As following steps require you to relocate Users folder two times, the less data is left in user profile folders, the faster the relocation process. Important: Leave system folder AppData for each profile intact, do not empty / move its content!
• Reverse the relocating, doing exactly as told in tutorial Method Two but this time relocating Users folder back to C: drive
• Shut down the PC, replace the disk where you had Users relocated
• Mount the new disk, boot to Windows, assign new disk the same drive ID letter than the old one had
• Again, do as told in Method Two, now relocating Users to new disk
• Restore the backed up personal user data from external drive to respective folders under each user profile