Issue 399856 in chromium: User profile under symbolic links will

[chro...@googlecode.com]

Status: Unconfirmed
Owner: ----
Labels: Pri-2 Via-Wizard Type-Bug OS-Windows

New issue 399856 by buente.s...@gmail.com: User profile under symbolic
links will
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399856

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML,
like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
Place your complete Windows-Userprofile (in my case) or even just your
Chrome-Userdata in a directory using a symbolic link created with mklink.

1. Close all chrome processes and open a command line and move
to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome.
2. If a directory "User Data" exists rename or delete it.
3. enter "mklink /D /J "User Data" "D:\SomePath" replace "D:\Somepath" with
an existing user-writeable path.
4. Start Chrome.

What is the expected behavior?
The expected behavior is, that chrome will store all userdata
under "D:\SomePath" and operate normally.

What went wrong?
Chrome will produce different errors:

1)
In most cases no settings are saved by chrome. Every time you start up
chrome it will use the default settings, or if copied the profile from
another folder these settings.

2)
When starting up chrome in 99% of the time chrome wants to restore the last
session by asking the user.

3)
When exitting chrome in most cases the last chrome process never ends or
ends earliest 30-60 seconds after closing the browser.

Did this work before? N/A

Chrome version: 36.0.1985.125 Channel: stable
OS Version: 6.1 (Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2)
Flash Version: Shockwave Flash 14.0 r0

I found this behavior after setting up a new windows installation. I moved
the complete "C:\Users" to another hard disk and linked the "C:\Users" via
mklink to the other hard disk.

It seems this behavior is really dependent on a symbolic link somewhere in
the user-data-dir path.

I installed the Chrome group policy and set the user-data-dir for the users
to another hard drive via this policy ("E:\Chrome\${user_name}"). This will
solve this issue, but makes chrome ignoring manual "--user-data-dir" on the
command line and makes Chrome Portable even using the computers Chrome
directory.

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Updates:
Labels: Cr-UI-Browser-Profiles

Comment #1 on issue 399856 by w...@chromium.org: User profile under symbolic
links will
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399856

(No comment was entered for this change.)

[chro...@googlecode.com]

Updates:
Labels: Needs-Feedback

Comment #2 on issue 399856 by sday...@chromium.org: User profile under

symbolic links will
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399856

buente.sven,thanks for filing the issue.Before setting up new windows
installation does it use to work fine ?? Can you confirm this issue with
Some different Window machine ?

Please do clean installation with Latest chrome version:38.0.2114.2
without deleting the browser data if it is important and check its
behaving as expected or not.

Please send me the demo video this time which helps in triaging it further.

thanks in advance.

[chro...@googlecode.com]

Comment #3 on issue 399856 by buente.s...@gmail.com: User profile under

symbolic links will
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399856

Hello sday!
I have tried to reproduce the problem on another computer today. Even when
symlinking to another physical harddisk on that computer everything went
fine (rather the same software prerequisites: chrome version 36.0.1985.125
on a Win7 Professional 64bit)...

Now I have completely uninstalled chrome from my computer, removed any
policy and cleaned all directorys "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google"
and "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome" (My user settings are synced, so there
is no need to keep them for this tests).

Then I have downloaded the ChromeSetup.exe from the developer channel.

The rest of this I have documented in a video you may find here: (sorry,
its a bit big...):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByW2UjLWwYfOd1NGVThlQnR4R00/

What you may see in this video:
1) I install the browser by calling the ChromeSetup.exe.
2) at 1:30 checking the version: 38.0.2107.3 dev-m (64 bit) is installed,
sorry, but I don't know where or how to get 38.0.2114.2...
3) Then I do some settings: Show the Startpage-Button, show the link-list
all the time, disable the apps in background and the Apps-Button in the
link-list.
4) after closing the browser in 1:55 you see a chrome.exe process remaining
in the taskmanager until i killed it at 3:30. The process all the time uses
about 10-20% CPU and 30-40 MB RAM.
5) after reopening you will see the settings took no effect: The Link-list
is not visible, no Startpage-Button. Just the question for signin in in
Google is missing, so it seems no complete "restart" of settings.
6) I do nothing and close the browser again at 3:54. Now you see the last
chrome.exe process disappear at 4:26. 32 seconds later.
7) I reopen Chrome and surfin around a bit. At 5:28 I close the browser
again and you will notice the chrome.exe processes disappear immediately.
8) Next time I close the browser at 6:05, the last process staying alive
again for 28 seconds until 6:33.
9) Next time again I do some settings, like showing a
startpage "www.faz.de". The browser is closed at 7:28, the process
disappears 5 seconds later (that is an acceptable time to end in my
oppinion).
10) When reopening the browser, again all settings are lost. No startpage,
no Startpage-Button...

So, after the symlinking worked on another windows machine... I don't know
where the problem may be. I tried to uninstall my antivirus and chrome
several times, even without any installed antivirus software the problem
keeps the same.

I would be really glad if you can help me finding the problem and getting a
nice solution.
Sven

[chro...@googlecode.com]

Comment #4 on issue 399856 by hmupp...@chromium.org: User profile under
symbolic links will
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399856

I tried with chrome 37.0.2062.120 stable, but couldn't reproduce the issue.

Followed the steps mentioned in description.
After step-3, it will create a "User Data" folder in
C:\Users\<xyz>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome and a link icon is showed on
this folder. When we launch chrome, all the user data is created beside it
at the same directory level.
Tried creating a profile, linking data, browsing, bookmarks etc and
everything works fine.

Lets assume, I create mklink with wrong path say,
C:\Users\hmuppala\AppData\Local\Chrome, it will create "User Data"
directory too, but chrome doesn't launch. Its clearly shows an error
that "user data refers to an unknown location".

buente@, Would you try above two scenarios with M37 stable and update.


Attachments:
399856.png 0 bytes

[chro...@googlecode.com]

Comment #5 on issue 399856 by hmupp...@chromium.org: User profile under

symbolic links will
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399856

Attached folder for reference

Attachments:
399856.png 30.9 KB

[chro...@googlecode.com]

Updates:
Status: WontFix

Comment #7 on issue 399856 by hmupp...@chromium.org: User profile under
symbolic links will
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399856

Very thankful for the update.

Closing this thread per #6. Please feel free to raise a new ticket for any
issues observed.