Change Profiles Location in NT4

To move the locally cached copy of the profile, you will need to know the security identifier (SID) of the user whose profile you want to move. You can identify the SID by using GetSID.exe from the Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit.

Windows NT 4.0 stores the local profile information in the registry under the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
Under the ProfileList key, there will be subkeys named with the SIDs of the users who have logged on to this computer. (To find the profile information for the user whose locally cached profile you want to move, find the SID for the user with the GetSID.exe utility.) Inside of the appropriate user's subkey, you will see a string value named ProfileImagePath. ProfileImagePath should be set to a local path where you want to store the profile.

If you do not have a roaming profile and you want to maintain your profile after you change the locally cached profile path, copy the contents of your old locally cached profile folder to the new location set in the ProfileImagePath value.

The answer above is from Microsoft's TechNet article Q214470. That article is interesting in that it tells you how to move cached profiles that already exist but doesn't say anything about altering the default location. It sort of implies that thedefault location is hard-coded to the %systemroot%\profiles directory.

But there is a registry key that allows you to define the path for the common (i.e. AllUsers) profile. It's in the same general area as the key mentioned in the article - you can find it by searching the registry for '%systemroot%\profiles'. If I recall correctly, it's under Explorer and called something like User Shell Folders. It is possible that changing this key might change the default but I haven't had the chance to try it.

paul

I must be missing something... There is a profile path block in the "profiles" button on the User Manager in NT4. I have successfully used this to create user profiles in "other-than-default destinations".

Your answer to the first question is that you only want the path different for new users. I understand that moving a profile intact is a little tricky but creating a new user profile in a specified location is built-in functionality.

Point value changed by question poster.

Your question paired with your response to the previous given answers causes one to ponder in many directions. If your enviroment is a domain and a PDC is authenticating then you should have to do nothing more than change the "profile path" in "user manager". If you are using P2P then I wonder how one could log onto a workstation unless you have set up his account. When you create the account ensure that the users profile path is set to whatever drive you want the profiles stored. As for the accounts that have already been generated a script file using the "NET USER" command with the "profiledirectory" option should allow you to easily change the path of your current users. I just used this when adding a machine to act as a new PDC that would also store the profiles. It took me 45 minutes to change the location of the profile share and 45 seconds to modify the 1500 user accounts to look for and store the profiles in the new location. Hope this helps.

I would convert all your profiles to roaming and store them on the sever in your directory of choice. You can set a system policy to always download the profile when a user logs in. This should avoid a lot of changes to the cached profile and reduce fragmentation.

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