Copying profiles brings undesired results.

[Guest]

Moving some people from a workgroup to a new domain, so new accounts were
created on the DC, the computers were logged into the domain, everything was
going smoothly. Right up until I attempted to copy their old local user
profile over to their new domain profile. I logged in the Admin account and
used the 'My Computer - Properties - Advanced - User Profiles - Copy To'
string of commands to copy the old user profile, selected the new user
profile directory as a destination, agreed to let the copy overwrite files.

The copy completed without complaint, I logged out of Admin and logged into
the domain user account, and there were visible problems with it. No themes
were applied, the taskbar was the Win2K-ish plain silver look, the start
menu's left side was completely blank, the properties on the Display settings
were showing a solid black screen instead of the desktop, and none of the
startup programs had executed. The desktop was showing the correct icons,
but other than that the user was in a completely non-functioning state after
the profile copy. This is a bit problematic, has anyone encountered this
sort of problem before?

 

[Torgeir Bakken \(MVP\)]

Hi,

I solve this profile "restore" another way:

I solve this by (in the registry) changing the profile path for
the new user to point to the old user's profile folder (the user
needs to log on at least once first).


From: Bruce Sanderson ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Moving a W2K PC between domains
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.win2000.general
Date: 2002-08-05 17:32:49 PST
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=uz48D$NPCHA.612@tkmsftngp08

If the user is not a local admin, you might need to to something on the
permission side. Use tip 4631 and 2240 in the 'Tips & Tricks' at
http://www.jsiinc.com as a guide.


More here as well:

Subject: Re: Lost profile when domain name changes
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.win2000.active_directory
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=262e40881c856d53


Regards,
Torgeir

 

[Colin Ingram]

I recently used this method to restore profiles on my system when I had
to rejoin the domain. I now cannot change setting related to file
extensions association. I cannot create a new file type and associate
it with a certain program. If I open a file by selected the program
from the windows generated list it will not associate with the program
when the "always use this program box is checked". I cannot associated
file extensions with programs using the menu option in the program.
This seems to be a permissions problem. My user is a local
administrator though so I don't know how to solve the problem. Any
help would be appreciated.

 

[Guest]

Ah ha. I had stupidly forgotten to enter the new user in the 'Permitted to
use' section of the profile copier, so it was copying the old profile without
setting permissions to let the new user access the profile properly. Despite
feeling foolish, I'm glad the issue is resolved. However, I tried your
method of pointing the new user to the old profile directory through the
registry, and it failed to load; Windows would complain upon booting that the
profile could not be accessed and would use a temporary profile instead.
Which is odd, given that I added the new user to the Local Admins group and
even gave him specific full control permissions on the old profile directory,
but Windows still wouldn't let the account use that directory.