Move the entire Documents and Settings folder to a different partition?

Hi folks,

I've just reinstalled XP Pro (x64 edition in case it makes any difference) and thought instead of having to go through the whole backing up of "Document and Settings", reinstalling then restoring that folder, has anyone found a good way of shifting the whole lot onto another partition?

There is some info on doing it on the microsoft support site but it involves copying all the folders then changing a gazillion registry entries and the copy always fails on NTUSER.DAT in the "All Users" or "Default User" profiles as the file is in use (duh!).

Note that I know about the folder redirection thing for just moving user's "My Documents" folders but unless there's a really good reason not to, I'd like to move all of the user profiles to another drive and have windows use the new folder as the location for creating new profiles. Possible?

MTIA
8bit

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Originally Posted by 8bit

Hi folks,

I've just reinstalled XP Pro (x64 edition in case it makes any difference) and thought instead of having to go through the whole backing up of "Document and Settings", reinstalling then restoring that folder, has anyone found a good way of shifting the whole lot onto another partition?

There is some info on doing it on the microsoft support site but it involves copying all the folders then changing a gazillion registry entries and the copy always fails on NTUSER.DAT in the "All Users" or "Default User" profiles as the file is in use (duh!).

Note that I know about the folder redirection thing for just moving user's "My Documents" folders but unless there's a really good reason not to, I'd like to move all of the user profiles to another drive and have windows use the new folder as the location for creating new profiles. Possible?

MTIA
8bit

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You need 2 accounts with admin privelages.
Log on as 1 and copy all but the your accounts stuff across. Edit the registry for all but your docs and settings location. Log on as the other acount and copy across the original account and do the registry changes.
This works, I've done it :)

OK thanks, but it still gives me an error message saying that NTUSER is locked and cannot be copied when copying either the LocalService profile folder or the NetworkService profile folder. The instructions on the MS site said to make sure the folder options were set to show hidden system files etc. which I did but it won't let me copy those folders! How did you get past that bit? It doesn't seem to make any difference what administrative account I try and copy them from...

Lets imagine you have a PC with 3 accounts.
One is a plain admin account, (administrator) another is an account you have created for the move (adminmove) and the other is a boggo ussr account (user)
Shut down PC (important)
Fire up PC, log on as administrator. Run regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
Change profilesdirectory to the new location. Any new users will now have their profiles go there.
go to your documents and settings folder. copy the adminmove and user folders to the new location. You will not get errors about files being locked UNLESS you have services using any of these user accounts to log on. To find out if you do go start>run>services.msc and make sure the log on as section uses no user accounts there.
Leave the S-15-18, S-15-19 and S-15-20 subkeys alone. Those profiles take up next to no space and I wouldn't risk changing them.
You will see some S-15-XX-blah subkeys. These are for the user accounts that exist on the computer. Within each key is a ProfileImagepath REG_EXPAND_SZ
Change these for all but the account you are logged on as.
Shutdown and restart the PC. Log on as adminmove.
start>run>cmd
type set and make sure the USERPROFILE shows the new location.
Move the administrator folder from documents and settings to the new location. Go into regedit again and change the profileimagepath for the administrator account.
Job done. If you want you can delete the profile for the adminmove account and delete the user. Use My computer/properties to delete the profile though. Do not use windows explorer :)

P.S. If you are determined to move the localservice and networkservice folders, boot in safe mode :)

You need to be working with the file system outside of the system itself, use BartPE. There are a lot of readonly/readlocked files in docs and settings, im not even sure if moving it to another partition in possible in a saine way.

OK thanks guys, I'll give that a shot. I think possibly leaving the system accounts where they are seems like a better idea right enough, I can only see bad things happening when it comes time to do a reinstall of XP.

Never heard of BartPE before, I'll google it, cheers aidanjt