Tech4Him – Technology with Integrity

Phew. For someone who’s corporate OS deployment experience has purposefully not included Vista, Windows 7 poses some challenges and a need to re-learn some things. Recently, one of our users brought us their machine that they recently had the hard drive replaced by a helpful soul. Unfortunately, the helpful soul returned the machine with Windows 7 RC rather than Windows XP Professional and our user has been using it for several weeks already. (Yes, I know this is not really the type of work I do, but hey, when folks are out of the office in a small organization, everyone pitches in.)

First thing we did was setup the local administrator account so we had a way in no matter what. Next, the machine was added to our domain. No problem. Next was to copy the local user profile to the domain profile, overwriting the basic domain profile and setting proper permissions. DOH! No, wait a minute. Why can’t I get into the Documents and Settings folder?

Some quick reading and I realized that in Vista and now Windows 7, this is really just a symbolic link of sorts and the real profiles are in C:\Users. So I copy local profile folders over to the new domain profile. Oops, another revelation, now I have copies of core profile folders and files. Ugh! Quick, delete the domain user profile and try again. Nope!

Now every time I try to login as the domain account, it creates a temp profile, even after deleting the profile for this account. Argh! 

Thanks to Google, I came across this article from Microsoft about Windows Server 2008 R2 and a similar issue. In it, I opened regedt32.exe and deleted the offending profile registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\<User_SID>

This solved the problem of always creating a temp profile upon login.

Now back to trying to copy the local profile to the domain profile. Let is suffice that after a bit of Googling combined with much trial and error, I came across these steps that seem to provide a solution.

1. Download Windows Enabler from http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/speedload/Enabler.htm
2. Save it to a USB drive. (That’s another reason I love this little utility.)
3. Right-Click “Windows Enabler.exe” and choose “Run As Administrator”
4. Click the Notification Tray icon for Windows Enabler to turn Windows Enabler on.  The icon with change to say “on”.
5. Open the System Properties applet and choose Advanced System Settings.
6. Open the “User Profiles” dialog and click on the grayed out “Copy To…” button and it will become enabled.
7. Copy the profile as you used to in XP and Vista.
8. When completed. We need to update permissions on the registry key.
9. Start –> Run –>regedt32 (Open the registry editor)
10. Locate the profile key in: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\<User_SID>
11. Right click on the Key and choose “Permissions”
12. Locate the User account that will use this profile and give Full Control
13. Reboot

After all of that, I was able to log in and most everything was good to go. The only issue we had was with Outlook as the .PST did not move. I then manually copied the .pst files to their proper place in the new profile and then added them to the mail profile for this user, opened Outlook and then remove the old data files from the profile.

Long way around but it ended up working. Now I’m no Windows 7 expert ,just sharing and documenting my steps for future reference. Your mileage might vary.

Blessings.

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