How to move your WinXP User Profile to a different location

[Anusha]

If you have ever needed to do this, here's the way.


First, you have to have another working user profile, with administrator privileges.

Then log off from your profile, which you need to move.

Log in from the other account.

Copy the profile files to wherever you want to move it to. (eg: copy C:\Documents and Settings\YOU to D:\Users\YOU)

Go to regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Expand the ProfileList key. You will see something like this:
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/4756/profileslistzy0.jpg

Note: You might see different keys, but they will look similar to these.

Click on the profiles with a long name (eg: S-1-5-21-149326177-3158526017-926773828-1006) and check on the right hand side pane if you can identify which profile is yours. There is an Expandable_String_Value (REG_EXPAND_SZ) called ProfileImagePath, and its value should be the current path of the profile. (i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\YOU). Change its value to D:\Users\YOU.

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/2753/profileslistdx7.jpg

Log off and log in from the changed profile.

Now you can delete C:\Documents and Settings\YOU

[BlackNight]

never wanted to do that......anyway thanx for the info

[Anusha]

I forgot to mention. This works with Vista too. Those screenshots are from Vista.

[lasanka]

hey dude tnx
thats pretty useful.... i might need to do that my partition for XP is a lil too full for my liking.... sniff

[Anusha]

never wanted to do that......anyway thanx for the info
I always wanted to do that because I use disk imaging. If I had the user profile in the default path, and if I had to restore an old image because Windows got screwed up for some reason, I would lose the latest customized settings because it will restore the old user profile.

[lasanka]

shit i never even thought of dat awesome man... tnx!!!!!!!!!

[Anusha]

And you can more all the profiles like this, but have to use a different profile to do it from, because you can't copy your profile completely to the new location while you are using it. There are at least a couple of files which are in use by Windows.

[Anusha]

shit i never even thought of dat awesome man... tnx!!!!!!!!!
But you know, the best thing to do is making a customized XP CD using nLite. You can change the default path of the whole Profiles folder (i.e. C:\Documents and Settings) to something else. But if you have more than one hard drive, you have to be careful with the drive letter assignment. For example, if u have 2 drives, XP setup assigns the drive letters this way - C: for the system partition, D: for the primary partition of the next drive, E: for the first logical partition of system drive, F: for the second logical partition of the system drive.....