XP and Windows 7 Mandatory Profiles?

[mprice]

Hi Edugeek's,

 

We have a bunch of workstations currently running Windows XP Pro, with our server running Server 2008. The students and staff use mandatory profiles with "My Documents" redirected to their home drive with only a couple of users in school office using roaming profiles.

 

We are looking to move to Windows 7 or maybe newer but will need to replace a chunk of the machines to run the newer OS so would like to stagger the update as the budget doesn't allow us to go out and replace the old machines.

 

My question is, how do you deal with profiles with Windows XP and Windows 7 running along side each other?

 

I understand that if you have roaming profiles enabled with XP, it will create a Windows 7 profiles using the appended V2 and there are no real problems. But can you have mandatory profiles running concurrently to cover both OS's?

 

If not, any suggestions on a good course of action to take to help migrate?

[andyire]

Yep you can have mandatory profiles working for both XP and Windows 7, just edit the NTUSER.DAT in the .V2 folder just like in XP and change the extension to .MAN. Both profiles should continue to work fine alongside each other.

Creating a Mandatory User Profile

 

When a user logs on at a Windows XP machine their XP profile should be picked up, when a User logs on at an Win 7 machine their .V2 profile should be picked up. We were running XP and win7 together for a while because we had to gradually roll out in some areas.

 

Keep in mind that the 2 profiles will be completely separate though.

 

Also the Win7 profile is quite a lot larger in size than the windows XP profile.

Keep this in mind if you have any unlocked profiles and perhaps have a quota per user on profile folders.

You will run into roaming profile issues, with .CC and TEMPS showing up.

[mprice]

Cheers Andy for the reply.

 

So under the user account profile tab, we have the profile path \\server.local\profiles$\students

 

So for the Windows 7 profile do I just copy up the profile from Windows 7 to a folder called students.V2 within \\server.local\profiles$ and Windows 7 will automatically pick up "students.V2" and XP will carry on using "students"?

 

Many Thanks for your help

[Griff]

heres a useful link we used when creating profiles on W7 Mandatory Profiles Solution for Windows 7 | K-5 Computer Lab

[andyire]

Hi mprice,

 

I would suggest the following as a place to start;

 

1) creating a test user

2) on the ADDS test users profile tab, add the path \\server.local\profiles$\students (you could use something like \\server.local\profiles$\testAccount, and change it up later if you wanted)

3) log on to your test Windows 7 machine with your test user account.

4) make any necessary profile customizations you require (i.e changing the desktop background),

5) log off the PC and windows will upload the profile to your profile server and create the folder \\server.local\profiles$\students.V2 for you.

I suggest doing it this way because, if you simply copy the profile from the local PC up to the profile server you will end up with unnecessary directories in your mandatory profile (i.e C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local).

6) Change the NTUSER.MAN to NTUSER.DAT in the freshly generated .V2

 

Then just leave the users profile path on the AD DS profile tab to \\server.local\profiles$\students (or whatever you use).

 

When you log on XP it will use the "students" folder.

When you log on to Windows 7 , Windows will look for the "students.V2"

 

If you change the profile path on the AD DS profile tab to \\server.local\profiles$\students.V2, windows will expect the profile to exist at \\server.local\profiles$\students.V2.V2.

 

I suggest having a play about with this until you are confident on the whole process and see what gives. I like to break things in Virtual Box before going wild on the production environment, but maybe thats just me.

 

Good Luck