Handy Software Lab Products Knowledge Base

I just got done setting up my new Windows 2003 server at home. I had another server before which was running as my domain controller. This was causing DNS issues because I stupidly named?my local?domain the same as?my web domain name. I couldn't visit my website using the base domain name because that IP resolved to my local DNS server and when I tried to delete that entry on my DNS server and point it to the correct IP it somehow magically reappears after sometime. At any rate I decided to setup a new Windows 2003 server as my new domain controller for a different domain.

The problem I had is I needed to rejoin the new domain and I didn't want to lose all my local profile settings so I thought I could just copy the profile but that doesn't work very because my old profile shows up as "Account Unknown". So I started on my hunt for a way to copy my profile over. Instead I found an article on Windows IT Pro that shows how to Move User Profiles.

Here are the general steps they listed:

The One-Size-Fits-All Approach
Let's try a step-by-step example. Suppose Jake once used a local account to log on to a machine named Old, and he'll now use a different local account to log on to a machine named New. Here's how to move his profile from Old to New.

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1. Copy Jake's old profile folder from Old to New. The %USERPROFILE% environment variable identifies the location of Jake's profile. (You must log on as Jake for this method to work.) Alternatively, look in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\SID\ProfileImagePath subkey, where SID is Jake's SID. If you need to determine which SID is Jake's, use GetSID, which you can download from http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/default.asp. GetSID's syntax is a bit odd:

	getsid 
	

where accountname is the account's name and accountsource is the name of the machine that contains the account. Having the account name and machine name appear twice isn't a typo—both names must appear twice. In Jake's case, you would type

	getsid \\Old jake \\Old jake
	

Now you have the SID and therefore the correct registry subkey.

2. After you find Jake's profile, copy it to the location in which New keeps profiles—probably Documents and Settings, so his copied profile now sits in C:\documents and settings\jake.
3. Create Jake's new local account on New. Log on as Jake, then log off. Log back on to the system as a local administrator, and use GetSID to find Jake's new SID.
4. Open Jake's folder in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. Double-click the ProfileImagePath subkey and replace its contents with \%systemdrive%\documents and settings\jake. Close your registry editor.
5. To fix the file and directory permissions, right-click the Jake directory and choose Properties. On the Security tab, add a permission for Jake in the typical way: Click the Add button, then choose the local Jake account. Back on the Security tab, give Jake full control by clicking the box under Allow next to Full Control. Close the dialog boxes.
6. Start up regedt32 (in Win2K or NT) or regedit (in Windows Server 2003 or XP). Navigate to the HKEY_USERS hive. In regedt32, click Registry, Load Hive; in regedit, click File, Load Hive. In the Load Hive dialog box, navigate to C:\documents and settings\jake. Inside that folder, select ntuser.dat and click OK. A second Load Hive dialog box asks you to fill in a Key Name text field. Enter Jake and click OK.
7. On your registry editor's main screen, open the HKEY_USERS hive. In regedt32, click the Jake folder and choose Security, Permissions; in regedit, right-click the Jake folder and choose Permissions. Click Add and add a new permission entry for Jake. Click OK to return to the Permissions for dialog box. Give Jake full control over his registry subkeys by clicking the box under Allow next to Full Control, then click OK to return to the registry editor's main screen.
8. Now that you're finished with the modifications, you need to write the changes back to the file. To do so, click the HKEY_USERS\Jake folder. In regedt32, click Registry, Unload Hive; in regedit, select File, Unload Hive. Choose Yes to confirm the action. Exit your registry editor.

[Move User Profiles]

After doing this pretty much everything worked. With the exception I had to re-enter any of my saved passwords, which is not a big deal. I believe the passwords were wrong because they probably use DPAPI which uses the currently logged in user as part of the encryption key.