7

When I launched Chrome (37.0.2062.102) today, all my extensions were gone, although yesterday everything was fine. I did some research into this issues of course, assuming that my user data is corrupt. One "solution" was to delete "%LOCALAPPDATA%/Google/Chrome/User Data/Default" which was what I did, knowing that I synced my browser state anyway.

I use the sync feature for all my Chrome instances since it is available and it worked flawlessly over the years. However, now the "Sign in to Chrome" menu entry is simply missing. I found out that you can sign in via some kind of new profile manager, I never saw before, but then you are not prompted for your sync passphrase and neither extensions nor stored passwords are restored.

When you google for a solution to this, you'll find forum entries and posts from all years for all Chrome versions. Everything outdated and nothing on this specific issue for the most recent Chrome version. Even when you look into Chrome's official help pages, you are always told to use the "Sign in to chrome" menu entry, which obviously isn't possible anymore.

So please, can anyone tell me how I am supposed to sign in and get my broken Chrome instance syncing again?

NullAndVoid
  • 313

3 Answers3

9

I found the solution to my problem, by stumbling upon

chrome://policy

where SigninAllowed was flagged false and SyncDisabled was flagged true

These two flags can be set via the following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\SigninAllowed HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\SyncDisabled

Just for reference.

NullAndVoid
  • 313
6

The registry keys that I found to control this were

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome\SigninAllowed
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome\SyncDisabled

rather than

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\SigninAllowed
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\SyncDisabled

I had to run regedt32 as an administrator to update the settings.

suspectus
  • 5,008
Nik Gibbens
  • 61
1

I know this question is very old and already got an answer. However, many users may face this issue still in 2024 and may come here to find a solution. So I am sharing the latest way to fix the "Sign In to Chrome missing issue."

Just follow these steps:

  1. Open Google Chrome
  2. Click on the three dots placed on the top-right side of the browser
  3. Click on Settings
  4. Go to "Sync and Google services"
  5. Now enable the "Allow Chrome sign-in" option and restart your browser.

You are done. I hope this will help.

SJ Siam
  • 11