Question

2 accounts but 1 profile possible?

Asked by: zeddock

We have about 40 workstations (XP and 2k) running in an NT4 domain. Soon we will migrate to a new server and domain.  Currently the workstation users do not use roaming profiles, they log on as a domain user account.

During the migration the old server will be unavailable for users to Log in. I know that they will get temp Profiles during this time, but I read that HD changes while they are on the temp profile will be deleted.

We want to give the users a local account/profile on their machines which looks just like their domain profile. So far the only way to do this has been to copy EVERYTHING from one profile to another... making a dup of everything.  Seems to me that if we just had a way of creating a new local user and having that user profile just point to the domain user profile it would be easier and save us time and HD space.

Is there a way to do this?

TIA.

Zeddock

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Asked On
2005-05-02 at 12:22:25ID21409951
Tags

1

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profile

Topic

Windows XP Operating System

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Answers

 

by: TheMCSEPosted on 2005-05-02 at 18:24:52ID: 13914349

I did something like this a very long time ago; I believe the two key pieces are modifying the appropriate subkey(s) of:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

to reflect the appropriate path for the specific user accounts.  Of course you also have to ensure that the user would have appropriate access to the specified profile.  If your users are members of the Administrators group, this isn't an issue; otherwise, you may have to modify the NTFS permissions of  the profile directory.  I think there was an old article on MS's site about migrating users from one domain to another that may have mentioned some of these steps; I'll go see if I can find it.  I think the ADMT and Security Translation Wizard may be able to perform some of these same steps, but not sure of the limitations.

 

by: TheMCSEPosted on 2005-05-02 at 18:27:56ID: 13914358

This was the article I was thinking of:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4899

It actually copies the user's profile to the Default User, then let's it be inherited (and duplicated) by the new user.  Good luck!

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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