Moving a machine from Domain to Home network

[Mark Levison]

I was recently allowed to take my older development machine home for
personal use (at 2 1/2 years old it's still better than 1.6 Ghz
Athlon). But I've run into some interesting problems. This machine has
spent its entire life on a domain. When booted the machine up at home I
discovered that my personal account had only ever existed on the
domain. Of course at home it can't find its original (or any) domain
controller and so I can't login. I've managed to use "emergency repair
software" to reset the local admin password, so I now have complete
control of the machine. I can even create a new account - but I can't
figure how to get access to my old domain based account. I would prefer
not to reformat the machine since there is slight chance I might have
to bring it back into the office and use it to fix a bug on an old
(hopefully dead) product.

When I try bring up the user profiles dialog it says the name of the
account is unknown and it disables both the copyto and delete buttons.

What's next?

Thanks
Mark

 

[Guest]

Well, not much actually unless you're connected to the domain. You should be
able to dig up your profile under C:\Documents and Settings. In there you'll
find your favorites, My Doucments etc. though that may be encrypted or setup
with permissions that don't let you access them. You can get around the
permissions by taking ownership of the files, but none of this is going to
let you login to it once the cached password has expired. To see NTFS
permissions on Windows XP you'll want to go to double-click on My computer,
select folder options from the tools menu, then click on the view tab,
deselect use simple filesharing.

 

[Mark Levison]

Well, not much actually unless you're connected to the domain. You should be
able to dig up your profile under C:\Documents and Settings. In there you'll
find your favorites, My Doucments etc. though that may be encrypted or setup
with permissions that don't let you access them. You can get around the
permissions by taking ownership of the files, but none of this is going to
let you login to it once the cached password has expired. To see NTFS
permissions on Windows XP you'll want to go to double-click on My computer,
select folder options from the tools menu, then click on the view tab,
deselect use simple filesharing.

Thanks I know how to get ownership of the files - but I was really
interested in all the apps that are installed. Some are a waste of
space because I know they will never be used again (VS 2005 Beta 2.
etc). Others it would nice to have access to from my new account. My
suspicion is I will should just backup the data, reformat and reinstall
everything that's relevant.

Thanks for the reply Keith.

Mark