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zemarcFlag for United States of America

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why duplicate profiles

Hi All, I have a couple issues...
We have a new 2003 Server Enterprise Ed.  We copied profiles from our old 2003 Standard Ed. to the Ent.Ed. and now have duplicates on the Enterprise Ed. i.e. under Doc and Set profilename and profilename.DOMAIN.   Logging in to the new server, desktops do not show up.  They point to the All Users profile only?  Both computers are DC's.  Std Ed was demoted and Ent. Ed was promoted.  I know I'm all over the place with this 'question', but why do I have two profiles and how to get user desktops to appear?  File attached for reference.

Thanks for your prompt feedback
DocandSet.doc
Microsoft Legacy OSMicrosoft Server OSWindows Server 2003

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Henrik Johansson
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Robin Human
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check any individual profile in ADUC - check the Profile tab  for a user and the path listed there;
You will (probably) find that they point to the old server - you need to change that to the new server.
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zemarc
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ASKER

Sorry, nada.
Profile tab is blank.
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Robin Human
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That's why the desktop is not loading..
Are they set to roaming profiles? If so, there should be an entry pointing to the path where the profile is stored (if it isn't there, it should be) - if not, the profile will be on the local machine, and something is telling the user logon to look elsewhere for the profile..
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zemarc
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There has never been a profile path entered.
A little background: Users connect via RDP using a Wyse thin-client.  "Local" machine for them is the Server.
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zemarc
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ASKER

Hi henjoh09
Please clarify. Registry entries, right? or ?
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zemarc
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I would appreciate any more feedback on this from anyone?
Huge Thanks
All user profiles that are loaded are also mapped in registry to give the connection user->folder. If this registry key (user's SID) doesn't exist depending on corrupt registry or different SIDs with same username and the folder exist, the folder can't be used. In this scenario, a new profile folder will be created with .domain or .domain.000 as described in my previous post.
Just copying the contents of 'c:\documents and settings' isn't enough because you have this registry mapping.
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3_S

Since you just did a copy I think the profile did not have the proper access rights for you users.  Did you check NTFS security of the copied profiles.  If the profile of the user can't be accessed by the user, a new will be created.

How did you do the copy exactly? which command/program did you use?
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zemarc
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Hi 3 S
Using Admin privileges on both servers and with both displays in view on the New server...
We did a simple copy/paste from/to Doc and Settings
You nead as I said to export/import the registry structure to the new server to retain the mapping between user and folder. If folder exist without having the mapping in registry, the folder will be duplicated.

A good point from 3_S about permissions as the user shall have full control of its own profile folder. If wrong permissions, the users should get an error about problems to load the profile. If pre-creating folders for users that haven't logged on to the actual machine, the folders nead as said to have correct permissions set.
Use robocopy command instead of copy/paste to keep the permissions.

As the folder has been duplicated, you have a couple of options:
* Delete new folder and rename the old folder to be USERNAME.DOMAIN to match the registry mapping
* Copy/move Desktop and other folders from USERNAME to overwrite the folder in USERNAME.DOMAIN
* Export the registry from the old server as reg-file and import the reg-file on new server.
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zemarc
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ok, will give recommendations a try.
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zemarc
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BTW, is there a way to try this first on a specific user only?
(We have 3 users (out of about 50) already working on the new server).
Thanks for your prompt reply.
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zemarc
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Please close this case number.
I decided to undertake the tedious task of setting up new profiles and config one-by-one.
Ugggh!
Author's comment requested to be accepted isn't answer for the initial question about why the profile folders are duplicated.

Profile folders will as I said be duplicated when not having a correct registry mapping between SID for user logging on and the existing folder.
My initial comment http:#23349793 includes the registry path for the mapping of the SID<->profile folder as reason for the duplicated folders. The rest of my comments are primary repeating/clarifying what I've already said.

http:#23349726 shall work as solution.

Suggest split
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2003 was based on Windows XP and was released in four editions: Web, Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter. It also had derivative versions for clusters, storage and Microsoft’s Small Business Server. Important upgrades included integrating Internet Information Services (IIS), improvements to Active Directory (AD) and Group Policy (GP), and the migration to Automated System Recovery (ASR).

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