Reconnecting deleted users to their profiles....

[Sleigher]

Well the subject says it all really....

My user gets deleted, recreate the account with new SID etc. but of course my profile on my laptop references the old SID which no longer exists - so try as I might I can't get my old profile across to the new account.

I've tried copying user.dat files, renaming the documents and settings sub-folder to match the new one - nothing.

Where the hell does XP keep it's list of profiled users and their profile directories??? I'm sure it's somewhere in the reg, but if someone could point it out to me it might save a hell of a lot of digging and searching....


JS

 

[hewissa]

Sleigher,

HKEY_CURRENT_USER
\Software\Microsoft\Windows
\CurrentVersion\Explorer
\User Shell Folders

Why not take ownership of the old profile, copy it and paste it into the new profile, replacing the new with the old. Is this a roaming or local account?

Hewissa

MCSE, CCNA, CIW

 

[Seaspray0]

You will have to take ownership of the old profile (including subfolders). Once done, you can give yourself permissions to it. The new profile will also give you a headache since the user is the only one with permissions. If you take ownership of it, and assign yourself permissions, you can copy the old profile to the new one. Don't forget to reassign ownership to the user and remove your administrative rights to his profile to return it to its previous permission status. If lots of users are involved, it might be simpler to let the user put his old profile back into the new one (giving the user a batch file to do this under his permissions works well). Take ownership of the old profiles and send them via email or even put them in a hidden share accessible by the batch file.

 

[Sleigher]

Thanks - Tried that and actually went even another step further....
When you go into my computer properties, advanced, user profiles - the computer reads the profiled users from the regkey with the associated SID under HKLM/software/microsoft/windowsNT/currentversion/profilelist/<corresponding sid label-keyname>

The reason I did this is that no matter how I try gippo the profile it ALWAYS goes and creates a new one, so I figure it's looking for a corresponding SID in the registry and when it can't find one it creates a new one. Granting permissions I tried but the profile still doesn't show under the user profiles in my computer - still picks it up as 'account unknown'.

I even tried renaming the SID key of the old profile to the SID key of the new user account but the SOB still sees right through it....

In the end I copied all the stuff under the profile to the new one and just had to go and reset all my specific user settings....

Any coders out there - this would be a damn helpful little vb-app to code if you can automate it and get it right!

Mush you huskies!



JS