GitHub doesn't synchronize anymore

Question

This is my first GitHub question so this might be pretty basic stuff and I'm sorry if it is repetitive or boring.

I had GitHub installed on my system (W7) for quite a while. Everything worked fine until I got a new computer. All of our data from the Users/ directory is centrally stored so whenever I log in to any computer, it will transfer all my data to this particular machine.

I installed GitHub on the new machine and made him search for the repositories (that still were there because they had been saved on the server). However, when I hit 'Sync' GitHub tells me "Failed to sync this branch. You might need to open a shell and debug the state of the repo."

When I open GitShell and enter "git pull", it tells me "git: 'pull' is not a git command." Since I have also msysgit installed, I tried to do the pull with Git Bash and this worked perfectly.

After reading stuff online I thought it might be a great idea to reinstall GitHub. However this seems to be impossible. (My account doesn't have admin privileges, I need to log in with a dedicated admin account, but after I have reinstalled it and change profiles again, my regular account is downloading the GitHub files from my profile again and it seems as if the program had never been removed).

So given all of this information: Do you have any idea, why GitHub is behaving so strange (while msysgit is doing just fine)? Is there any way of fixing this without reinstalling GitHub that you can think of?

Answer 1

GitHub's Windows application is not installed for all users; it is only installed for the user who installed it. Therefore installing it with an administrator account won't usually work. A few suggestions:

• Right click the installer in your non-administrative account and run as administrator, and then give the password of the machine administrator. This should let you reinstall it as your user.
• Regarding the git 'pull' not found: Check your path. Is it possible that it's not finding the right git executable? I would think that both the msysgit and the GitHub ones would work fine, there may be a problem somewhere.