Windows Profile Migration
Using
Brute Force and Ignorance
Almost 100% Command Line!
WARNING: The instructions below present all sorts of opportunities to break things in fantastic and horrible ways. This document was written with people who are already quite familiar with Windows internals in mind. If you are such a person then the following might facilitate a slight lessening of your misery. If you are not such a person and you continue then you will probably destroy many wonderful things that you love in a sadistic and hideous manner.
070927 - Updated! Now with 77.2% less misery!
There is now a tool that should take care of all of the horrible SID stuff that was required in the old version of this document
Introduction (you can skip this section)
One of my major irritations with Windows is that non-domain user profiles are virtually locked to specific windows installs. This wouldn't be such a problem if one could do things in Windows like move the mouse or press the shift key without the operating system obliterating itself.
Sadly if one wishes to use windows without having Russian key loggers broadcast one's bank account/pin numbers over the Internet one must reinstall windows an average of once every minute. Failure to reinstall windows at least once every week typically causes the machine it is running on to run wild in the night, eating neighbor's pets and babies.
Every time one re-installs windows one must deal with the festering colostomy bags known as the Windows Profiles. Windows Profiles contain pretty much all user files and configurations. Hidden within a profile are millions and millions of user SID numbers. SID numbers are like UIDs from other operating systems expect that.
- SIDs are not easily or uniformly readable/mutable.
- SIDs are Windows install specific. A SID from one install will not work with any other install.
Below I present a fairly functional method of migrating non-domain Windows 2000/XP profiles from one windows install to another.
Things that you will need
- subinacl.exe - this is a command line windows permission editor. I use version 5.2.3790.1122. Be careful, there are many, many broken versions of this program around. note: you should be able to do without subinacl by using the graphical permissions editor through windows explorer.
- The proftool.exe program from the w32 hivetools distribution.
- A directory containing a user's profile that you want to restore.
- Windows running on the machine on which you wish to install the profile.
- A decent way to copy very nested profile directories such as the "cp" command from here
Instructions
Step 1: Be An Administrator
Step 2: Grant Yourself Access To The SAM
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SAM /grant=Administrator=f
Step 3: Create a user with the same name and profile directory as the user you wish to restore
Step 4: Login as the user you just created
This is necessary to "register" user's profile in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList". If you don't do this then Windows will ignore the profile that you copy to "C:\Documents and Settings" and will create something like "Username.Workgroup" or "Username.jfIYUlSEijbBUWO".
Step 5: Logoff as the user you just created
Step 6: Rename/move the newly-created profile directory so that it is out of the way
Step 7: Copy the profile you wish to restore to "C:\Documents and Settings"
It must have the same name as the profile directory that you just moved out of the way.
Copying things with Explorer or xcopy can be a horrible experience. You should use "cp -r", available from here
cp -vr "e:/profile/backup/directory/Username" "c:/Documents and Settings"
Step 8: Set the directory permissions
NOTE: the duplicate lines below differ only by a backslash appended to the directory name. This is necessary because without the backslash it will effect the only the directory. Without a backslash it will effect only subdirectories and files of the selected directory, not the directory itself.
cd c:/Documents and Settingssubinacl /subdirectories username /setowner=usernamesubinacl /subdirectories username\ /setowner=username
Step 9: Set the user hive permissions
proftool "username" "user_profile_path"
All Done!
There will be lots of .lnk files that go nowhere and very annoying desktop.ini files in places like "Startup". Aside from that your profile should be back to normal.