Migrating user profile after joining domain

[Todd Hobdey]

Start with an XP machine in a workgroup with local (of course) user Some Guy
(user name of sguy). Obviously his profile is at c:\documents and
settings\sguy. Then join that machine to a domain where Some Guy will be
using DOMAIN\sguy. The client will create c:\documents and
settings\sguy.DOMAIN.

I want to transition the user's profile to the domain account as
transparently to the user as possible. I logged on as Administrator and
used System => User Profiles to copy the profile of sguy to DOMAIN\sguy's
profile directory, which worked fine but HKEY_CURRENT_USER still contains a
number of references to the old profile directory. I could do a search and
replace, but it seems like there should be an easier answer to this. USMT?
That would probably work as long as there's no other users on the particular
machine. I can't help but think this would be a fairly common situation.

 

[Torgeir Bakken \(MVP\)]

Start with an XP machine in a workgroup with local (of course) user Some Guy
(user name of sguy). Obviously his profile is at c:\documents and
settings\sguy. Then join that machine to a domain where Some Guy will be
using DOMAIN\sguy. The client will create c:\documents and
settings\sguy.DOMAIN.

I want to transition the user's profile to the domain account as
transparently to the user as possible. I logged on as Administrator and
used System => User Profiles to copy the profile of sguy to DOMAIN\sguy's
profile directory, which worked fine but HKEY_CURRENT_USER still contains a
number of references to the old profile directory. I could do a search and
replace, but it seems like there should be an easier answer to this. USMT?
That would probably work as long as there's no other users on the particular
machine. I can't help but think this would be a fairly common situation.

Hi

You can reuse the old profile with the "new" user by changing the new
user's ProfileImagePath in registry to point to the old profile.

More here:
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]

 

[Todd Hobdey]

Isn't there an permissions issue doing that? Assuming the volume is NTFS,
the new (domain) user wouldn't necessarily have the correct permissions to
everything in the old (local) user's profile directory, right? I suppose
you could just make the domain user the owner of all the local profile's
directories...

 

[Torgeir Bakken \(MVP\)]

Isn't there an permissions issue doing that? Assuming the volume is NTFS,
the new (domain) user wouldn't necessarily have the correct permissions to
everything in the old (local) user's profile directory, right? I suppose
you could just make the domain user the owner of all the local profile's
directories...

Hi

The permission issue is also mentioned in the link I provided.