Less painful way to upgrade clients to Win2K server from NT4

[mthaler 0]

Ok here is the deal. My client's business got purchased by an out-of-town company, and they up and took the NT4 server out of the office a couple weeks ago. I now have the task of installing a new server with Windows 2000 and I would like to do this a smoothly as possible. The problem as many of you probably know is whenever you log a Windows 2000 workstation into a new server, it creates a new profile and all the users settings etc get semi-lost. (they exist in the system but are difficult to access.

My question is, how can this be done easier?

Right now, I do a save of there internet cookies & favorites, make a note of the location of any PST files for outlook, save those settings if possible (difficult for some settings).

Then I let the new server know about the machine, it creates an account for the machine & user. Then when the user is logged in, you import the IE cookies & favorites, move the docs into the CURRENT "my documents" directory, and re-create or re-import the outlook settings.

Any better way? PLEASE HELP.

[Malkosha 0]

I'll take a stab at this one. What you could do, is setup a new local account, on the workstation. Then copy the current user profile over to the new profile. This should preserve most of the settings.

 

Later, when the user is up, copy the profile back. You will have to re-map any drives since the SID has changed, but the drives all already there so no problem. I'm not sure about cookies or fav's but they may also work.

 

Luck

[mthaler 0]

Have you actually tried this? Does it work?

The cookies and faves are easy to save in IE (export).

Oh yeah, another bugaboo is saving account info in Outlook. I often have to recreate that.

[Malkosha 0]

When the compnay I worked for split into 2 groups I had to move my users to another domain.

 

I copied the current domain profile to the administrators profile. I then changed domains on the PC, logon as the new user on a new domain, then copied the profile back.

 

This gave me:

Mapped drives, printers, desktops etc. I created a new outlook PST and imported the settings from the old one which was on their drive. I then copied favorites. I lost the cookies of course. I had to reconnect the mapped drives, becuase the user had changed, but it was easy considering the drives were already there ... they just didn't have permission to access them.

 

This saved me a ton of time, and I spent about 10min's per PC, depending on how big their PST was (if you don't watch them, they will grow ... one user had a 450meg PST).

 

Another cleaner way is to work with roaming profiles, but that would only be good for you in a future change.

 

Luck!!