Windows 2000: Moving User Profiles?

[ceraph]

Anyone have any experience with this?

Is it sufficient to just change the one registry setting for "ProfileList" and move all the folders to that path? Will this update all environment variables like %USERPROFILE% on boot? Do all programs refer to %USERPROFILE% when they try to find settings?

Better yet, is there some tool released by MS for allowing administrators to move profiles?

I know that under administration tools for users there is a setting for "Profile Location" -- if I change this setting, will it automagically copy the profile to the new location/make all necessary changes? (ie, to IE5's Temporary Internet Files crap, Outlook Express, etc)

If the above does do everything, can I use it to move "All Users" and "Default User?"

Help! Help! Danke.

 

[ceraph]

My you people are helpful today ... err, nevermind.

In any case, I went ahead and did it, here are some tips for anyone who wants to do it as well:

1. Copy the entire "Documents and Settings" folder to your desired location. If you're going to use Windows copy, make sure you have all the options to show hidden files, show system files, hide files disabled/enabled to reveal every single file in there. You can't copy the entire subdirectory structure with Windows 2000 when you're logged in because of open-file permissions. There is a "Profile" tab under Control Panel/System that copies the BASE profile of the user currently logged in, but not all application settings. SO... the quickest way to solve this if you have dual boot configured is just to boot in Windows95/98/ME and copy it from your 2000 root. If you don't.. eh, figure something out. Boot in Safe-Mode command prompt or something and use xcopy.
   
2. Here's the fun part, start Windows 2000 normally after you've copied the directory structure. What Microsoft recommends is going through your registry with regedit.exe (not regedt32.exe) and replacing anything that has "Documents and Settings" in it to reflect your new directory. Well, I did that -- but here's the problem: Windows 2000 constantly monitors the registry. After I went through the first time, I went through again and some of the entries had changed BACK (danke Windows). So.. basically I had to make changes to the ones that changed back and log out/login quickly to retain the changes =). In hindsight, to anyone doing this, it would probably be better for you to export your entire registry to a .reg file, do a text replace, and then import it all again.

There's somethings that you should remember when replacing the registry entries:

1. You may have some KEYS (not values) with "%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Documents and Settings" in them. What I did for these is just make new keys with the same VALUES as the old ones, and deleted the old keys. This is pretty stupid, I suppose, since programs look for KEYS when they search the registry, but I couldn't figure out anything else.. and nothing horrible has happened yet.
   
2. There are some entries with /Devices/MountedDisk#/... (where # is the logical partition number of the disk) in them that refer to files that are currently in use in the Documents and Settings folder. You can ignore these -- the values change at login.
   
3. If you have a custom toolbar running from your Profile directory, you won't be able to delete "Documents and Settings" until you disable the toolbar. Toolbar settings aren't kept in the registry.
   
4. Lastly, ALWAYS make sure you go through the registry multiple times before deleting the original "Documents and Settings" subdirectory. And I wouldn't recommend doing this if you have an insane amount of third-party applications installed that make use of your %USERPROFILE% directory. Some of them may retain settings that don't make use of the environment variable.

AND -- if you're planning on doing a clean install of Windows 2000, you can change the default profile folder to be whatever you want with Unattend.txt. Follow the link to Microsoft's support site for more information on this.

Cheers.