I've just gotten a replacement Surface 5 after my Surface 4 failed under a "flickergate" scenario. OneDrive was initially awesome to sync up a bunch of settings I had on my previous machine, however, due to the combination of my first initial and last name, it ended up as C:\Users\pchit, which, frankly (and perhaps vainly) I just don't like. Especially since I plan to use this machine to show live demos at conferences and workshops, I decided to figure out how to rename my user and home directory to "peter".
I followed one of the many sources of how to do this such as this video, which seemed to address it, except for that "handy" OneDrive sync feature.
To my chagrin, I found OneDrive showing a Location Not Available error each time I logged on indicating the drive path of C:\Users\pchit\OneDrive\Desktop as the source of the problem. Also, all my saved desktop shortcuts and pinned toolbar items disappeared.
How can I fix this so that the linked OneDrive shortcuts don't blow up my desktop experience?
1 Answer
The trick, I discovered was in the registry. According to this article, you need to edit some Explorer settings.
For me, by going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders I found a number of entries that used the OneDrive file paths.
Desktop : C:\Users\pchit\OneDrive\Desktop
My Pictures : C:\Users\pchit\OneDrive\Pictures
etc.Once I replaced all of these to my new home folder location (and relaunched the explorer.exe process), I was good to go. At least, so far, so good.
