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by drolrevo 2 views

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I have a small home network, NT server with proxy to a cable modem. I want to connect my win 2000 professional directly to the cable modem and no longer log on to the domain. When I set up the cable modem the machine is a member of a workgroup butnot a domain, there fore I lose all of my user settings. How can I keep the user profile and change to the workgroup?

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by cfburgess

The desired profile exists for the domain user, which is no longer a valid account.

Assuming you have setup the new workgroup user account and you can log in as administrator.

1. As administrator, go to Start/Settings/Control Panel/System. Select the User Profile tab.
2. Highlight the profile (old domain username) that contains the settings that you want.
3. Click on the Copy To button, then click on the Browse button.
4. Browse to c:\documents and settings\new user. (New user being the account where you want the settings available.)
5. Click OK. The machine will issue a warning that the selected profile will be overwritten. Click OK. You may get an error at this point that the user's reg file is locked or something like that. If so, reboot and log in as administrator and repeat the above steps.
6. Logging in as the new user should now give you access to all of the old user's settings.

by drolrevo

This didnt work, after the log in as admin to the workgroup the profile shows "unknown.user" and can be highlited but not copied? Does this have to do with the fact that the computer name has changed as well?

by cfburgess

The sid for the domain user can no longer be validated or matched to any known user, so the user is unknown. This is all related to the machine being removed from the domain. If the server is still running and the user account still exists on the server, add the W2k machine back into the domain. This should enable the profile and allow you to copy it to a local user account. You can then remove the machine from the domain.

by drolrevo

I dont want to say that this is "unacceptable" since any one kind enough to answer is appreciated but that didnt do it either? Can I rename (change the name)of the folder under docs and settings while under administrator and log back in under the user? Thanks

by cfburgess

Try this. As administrator, go to the documents and settings folder. You should see the old domain account listed there. Try copying the contents of that folder to the folder of the user account that you want to have these settings. Don't move them there just copy them.
Or there is a process, using regedit, where you can locate the sid for the new user account. And use it to find the profile path in the registry and change it to point to the folder that contains the settings that you want. I don't have the details on this process.

by cfburgess

BTW, you will probably want to create a copy of the contents of the users folder before copying the info to it. The SID issue may impact this copying effort.

by drolrevo

I found that the user profile was too large to copy in the current partition, yet there was no warning message of this, just failure. After freeing up over a gig of space for the 1.3 gig profile I achieved a copy as stated to begin with. Thanks

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