Preface: I am sure this has been asked some where on the site before but I couldn't find any questions about it, or maybe I am not using the correct verbiage…
Our admins are giving us a new active directory account on different domain. As I am a progammer (a member of IT) we are the group gets assigned new accounts first to test the migration. When I log in to my local machine using the new account I get a new local profile. Not the biggest deal, but on the new profile I am missing mappings, desktop items, wallpaper, etc. Our users I going to throw a fit if there is no way around this.
Two Questions:
I've seen references to NTUSER.DAT and suggestions to Copy all user files from "Documents and Settings", but is there a good way or is it even possible to associate my local profile with the new AD account?
Is there any thing that our admins can do to prevent this from happening?
Best Answer
Sounds like you're looking at migrating the state of existing user profiles to new domain accounts, then, eh?
You can't "associate" a local profile with another account, per se. (Yeah, yeah-- you could modify the NTFS ACL on the profile directory and the registry ACL embedeed inside the NTUSER.DAT file to to include the AD user account, then set the "ProfileImagePath" for the AD account's profile to match the one specified on the local account, but that sounds like a wholly unsupported scenario and not at all something I'd recommend doing.)
For a manual procedure to do this the "right way", have a look at: Migrate user profiles to new Active Directory Accounts
If you prefer something scriptable and more useful in a bulk-deployment scenario, you might look at the "User State Migration Tool" from Microsoft. (Providing a link to you is a bit problematic, because the specific version of the tool you'd use is dependent on the versions of Windows involved.)