Need help with moveuser.exe - Error 5 Access Denied message

[texnut]

Hello all,

I'm having major difficulty getting moveuser.exe to work for me. Here is some background:

We have two domains. One is the older Win2K3 domain and the other is the new Win2K8 domain. All workstations are WinXP SP3.

I've already created new userids in the new domain. I simply want to rewrite each users profile on the XP workstations to point to the new domain, so I figured moveuser.exe should be quite helpful.

In order to prep for moveuser.exe I created a two-way forest trust between the two domains, no problem (note: the functional levels of the two domains are different ... Win2K3 vs. Win2K8 but the trust seemed to take just fine and I was even able to validate it). I also setup the appropriate DNS forwarders, so I'm able to nslookup and ping each domain from the other.


Now, I go to my test workstation which is part of the Win2K8 domain. I login as domain admin and I proceed to run moveuser.exe. I consistently get an 'Error 5 Access is denied" message. Here is the command I'm running:

moveuser.exe win2k3domain\tuser win2k8domain\tuser /y

Does anyone know why I'm getting the access denied error? I've completely hit a brick wall with this and I'm not sure how to proceed.

Many thanks everyone

 

[texnut]

Ok - I just figured it out. Really, this is unbelievable, but I know this can help many others out there, so here is the fix:

It turns out it's related to an improperly unloaded user hive. Even if you reboot the PC several times, it doesn't necessarly clean up this problem. So you have two possible solutions:

1) Install UPHClient from Microsoft and wait for it to complete it's job. OR ...

2) If you're impatient, go directly to the user's profile key in the registry and reset the RefCount value to decimal 0.
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\{users SID}

After resetting the value to 0, you can run moveuser.exe without a hitch.

Hope this helps someone and saves them time!