Windows 11 login stuck on corrupt profile

[Jammie Dodger]

The available space on my C (system) drive was low, so I moved the Users folder to my D drive and edited the registry accordingly.

After rebooting, I logged in to my work account and checked everything was okay. So far, so good.

Then I rebooted and tried to log in to my personal account and got the error message:

The User Profile Service service failed to start.

User profile cannot be loaded.

I am stuck on this login screen, with no option to switch to my work account, even after a reboot.

Unfortunately, I don't have any System Restore points or any kind of backup to rely on.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[DVDR_Dog]

Ouch. Offhand if it's a work computer, no backups? All I can think of is triage with Win USB recover what you need, and get a bigger C drive. Shuffling O/S dependent files to another drive letter is asking for trouble. Eventually it'll blow up. Something will move those pointers back to C drive, probably a bad practice but that's what is typically expected. Really feel bad for you that happened. The randomness of what pointers might be off make it hard to impossible to diagnose.

 

[Jammie Dodger]

Ouch. Offhand if it's a work computer, no backups? All I can think of is triage with Win USB recover what you need, and get a bigger C drive. Shuffling O/S dependent files to another drive letter is asking for trouble. Eventually it'll blow up. Something will move those pointers back to C drive, probably a bad practice but that's what is typically expected. Really feel bad for you that happened. The randomness of what pointers might be off make it hard to impossible to diagnose.

Thanks for your advice, @DVDR_Dog - it's not a work computer, but I know that I ought to have backups and restore points.