John said:
Deleted a user from users & groups. The user is now back,
so instead of creating everything from scratch, I'd just
like to 'reactivate' his deleted account. Fortunatly, I
didn't delete the file with his information from
the 'Documents and Settings' folder. But how can I
reenable his account once he's been deleted?
Thanks,
John
You will NOT get the same SID for the new same-named account. However,
you can change the user's profile path (%userprofile%) after creating
the account to point at the old one. I don't know if the Profile
property of a user account is just for roaming profiles or also for
setting the default or local profile path. Otherwise, use regedit to
change to point at the user's old profile path. You can figure out
what account uses what SID by looking under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList where you can also change the
ProfileListPath data value to point at the old profile directory. Or
just copy or replace the old profile directory atop the new one. Before
creating the new same-named account, rename the old profile path
directory. That way maybe the new same-name account won't end up as
theirname_1 (or whatever it is that Windows postfixes to same-named
accounts with different SIDs) so the new account would be just
theirname.
If the user used EFS then they won't be able to access those
EFS-protected files or directories under the new same-named account's
SID. If they used EFS, they should have exported their security
certificate. When I use EFS, I specifically remove Administrator
account and Administrators group from getting included in the EFS key so
they cannot read those files (although they can still take ownership).
If the user didn't remove Administrator when they EFS protected the
files and directories, I suppose the Administrator could then include
the new same-named account back into the security settings so that new
user could then acces those files. If you use EFS, it behooves you to
save the security certificate onto a floppy and lock it up (unless you
want to rely on disk images to restore the whole drive).
