Redirecting user profiles

[chris4ops]

Hello,

Recently I moved my company to a new domain, and of course the users are complaining about not having their old profiles. I went into regedit, and redirected everyones SID Profile to point to their old profiles instead of the new one that was created for the new domain. The users get all their desktops, favorites, etc. back, except for one problem. Some applications don't work, they get "Access is Denied" errors, and they can't change any of their settings. I played around a little with some test profiles, and found that the settings are all kept within the NTUSERS.BAT file (Which I also found out to be the current user registry tree). Is there a way to make it so the new "SID/USER" can use the old NTUSER.BAT? or is everybody just going to have to redo all of their settings?
Thanks.

 

[wolluf]

I went into regedit, and redirected everyones SID Profile to point to their old profiles instead of the new one that was created for the new domain

What exactly did you do?

Are we talking roaming profiles?

You can specify profile location for each user in Active Directory - how many users are we talking - how did you migrate them from old to new domain.

Each user's settings are in ntuser.dat not ntusers.bat - which is in the profile. Is it just a permissions issue? (users need to have full permissions to everything in the profile - folders and files. If the profiles are still in their old location - on old server? - users in the new domain won't. So you may just need to change permissions at top level and make sure it applies all the way down the tree. I asked how many users as obviously the more there are the more you need automated proceses to effect changes).

HTH - post back if you need more.

 

[chris4ops]

Thanks for the reply, no we arn't using Roaming profiles.

In the registry, I went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Software -> Microsoft -> Windows NY -> CurrentVersion -> ProfileList: and just pointed the newly created user to the old profile in there.

There are only 4 users I need to do this for, everyone else has generic setups.

Yeah, NTUSER.DAT is what I meant sorry, been writing batch files so BAT was still stuck in my head .

I gave full permission to the profile folder (C:\Documents and Settings\Profile Folder) but the NTUSER.DAT still wasn't working correctly. Maybe I need to set the owner to the "new user"? It reset to administrator by default once the computer got changed to the new domain. (Profiles are all located on their own computer, not a specific server.)

 

[wolluf]

I've never edited the registry to redirect profiles - so don't know if it should work ok or not (can't see why not). Making user owner of the folder - and using the apply to all subcontainers option - then in advanced permissions apply top level permissions down the tree (I've often found some permissions are 'stubborn' - need this method to ensure every permission changed).

What I do to move profiles is either:-

Log on as user in new domain to create profile.
Restart machine & log on as administrator - remove everything under the top level profile name & then copy the old profile contents into the top level new profile name (it all picks up correct permissions automatically.

or

copy the old profiles to the server.
in AD set roaming profile for users to point to these old profile copies.
log on to each machine as user required - so picks up roaming profile.
In AD, remove the pointer to roaming profile - users now revert to local - but local has there previous profile now in place.