Create Active Directory User Profile

active-directoryprofile

Is there a way I can get a Windows XP computer that is a domain client to create certain user profiles without having to get the user to log in?

Best Answer

USMT will do this for you, but it can take a lot of trial and error to get exactly what you need.

When picking up a profile, you would run ScanState with the /ui:domain\username switch. I believe that stands for User Include. I think that picks up only that user, so you could do this as an admin on their desktop without being logged in as that user.

If all you want is that user's account/folder you may also have to look at using a Config.xml file to include or exclude various file, folders and settings. This page on Technet contains a sample XML file that can be modified.

I can't remember exactly, but you can run:

ScanState \\fileserver\mystore /ui:domain\username /genconfig:MyConfig.xml

and this will generate a configuration file for you. You can then view this file to see if what you need is going to be copied etc. Modify this file so that only the required settings and files will be moved and then use this file as an argument to ScanState:

ScanState \\fileserver\mystore /ui:domain\username /i:MyConfig.xml

In an ideal world, all that is left is to run LoadState on the new PC. Because you will only have backed up what you need, the Load should not need any fancy switches:

LoadState \\fileserver\mystore

should be enough. That should create the user's profile on the new PC and when they next log in they should see their files on the desktop and so on.

In my experience though, I spent days trying to configure all sorts of fancy settings to migrate over to their new desktop half of which I could never get to work properly. And then it took an hour to backup a profile, 10 minutes to move onto a fileshare and another hour to load the new profile. And then it would fail somewhere for no reason.

In the end, we only had 100 PCs to replace over the course of 2 months so we just reset the users passwords and logged in as them to set up pristine new profiles.

Technet has massive amounts of info on this:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd560775%28WS.10%29.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd560801%28WS.10%29.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd560755%28WS.10%29.aspx

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