Migrating dead domain offline profiles to new dom

[contink]

This is a sanity check that I'm hoping folks will have a few pointers on...

I've got a large number of laptops, workstations and a couple of admin machines with roaming profiles still loaded on them from a domain that I have absolutely no way of recovering.

I do have the data for the profiles and home folders and a rough idea of how things were organised but I've opted to create a new domain rather than recreate the old one (eg: school instead of curric).

At present these machines are still using offline versions of profiles, etc... and logging on as if they were on the old domain, but I do want to start joining them to the new one.

My concern is that when I make the switch I will find profile settings are lost or don't migrate so I'm looking for pointers on how best to retain the data.


Needless to say I do have backups of everything and I can always do a little "Try it and see" but any help from those who've been in the thick of it would be appreciated.

[SYNACK]

I have migrated across local profiles to domain ones when I upgraded a small business to a domain based system. It may be a little time consuming but it is easy. Once you create the user again on the domain, log in on a different station so that a new profile is created in the servers profile share.

Then just go to the machine with the cached profile and - after a reboot so that the files in the cached profile are not locked - simply copy the entire contents of their cached profile folder in documents and settings to their new server side folder. (clear out remote folder first)

You should now be able to log in on a machine that does not have the cached profile and it should drag down their restored profile from the server.

Once you have this working you can rejoin the old machine to the domain.

You are probably safe if you rejoined to the domain before hand also as windows does not usually overwrite the local profile cache if it is not the same user GUID, it will increment the new user with either username.domain or username.001.

[contink]

I have migrated across local profiles to domain ones when I upgraded a small business to a domain based system. It may be a little time consuming but it is easy. Once you create the user again on the domain, log in on a different station so that a new profile is created in the servers profile share.

Ah... luckily the old profile share and home shares still exist in data form, just not the actual share information (ie: what folders were shared to what letter, etc..). I've had to spend some time working it out the hard way by looking at disparate notes, shortcuts (never thought I'd be grateful of a messy desktop folder!) and the like.

You are probably safe if you rejoined to the domain before hand also as windows does not usually overwrite the local profile cache if it is not the same user GUID, it will increment the new user with either username.domain or username.001.

Useful to know nonetheless... I think most of what you've said is still useful but I reckon a little ownership taking and copy/pasting is in order..

Any other tips would be welcome, just want to be sure before I realllly fubar anything that "looks" obvious but isn't

[mullet_man]

When we updated our 2000 domain to 2003 we didn't migrate the profile's on the server over, after clients logoff the server recreated the profiles on the new server.

This was just a migration of domains, not a whole new one, but you could try it out on a test user e.g. back up there work before testing, could save you lots of time doing them manually.

[SYNACK]

Useful to know nonetheless... I think most of what you've said is still useful but I reckon a little ownership taking and copy/pasting is in order..

If you were doing it the way above, copying it to the pre-created folder it will use the file security inherited from the remote folder getting rid of the need to change the file permissions. It depends on your setup as to whether the remote profile has security that you need to override by taking ownership of the remote folder. But yes in the case that it is secured you would need to take ownership and add the administrators group as full control users.

Glad to hear that you found the profiles backed up though as this will make it easier. As it is a different domain you will still need to grab ownership and alter the permissions of those folders if security was enabled on them before though.