How to eliminate the domain suffix off my user profile folder when migrating to a new domain?
- by Jerry Dodge
We have just upgraded a decade old SBS 2003 server to a brand new SBS 2011 machine. During the process, over 30 other client/server machines on that domain also needed to be dis-joined and re-joined from the old domain to the new one. These domains have different names and is not migrated in any way. It's built from scratch.
Since each client machine had very unique user profiles under this domain, we needed to make sure these were all backed up and migrated over to the new domain. For the most part, profiles were migrated with no hassle, just by renaming the user profile folder names. However, in one case, when I log in to my domain account, it creates a profile folder with a suffix of the new domain name.
I have replaced all the files in the profile's root which begin with "ntuser" with the files of the new profile. The only problem is half the applications can't find their data, because the folder name is different. How can I change this folder name and maintain this profile on the new domain?
I have deleted every user account (except admin), deleted their profiles/folders, removed them from the registry, and made sure every trace of this account was gone. The computer was basically a dummy with only an admin account. Then, I log into the machine under my new domain user account (same username as the old domain). It creates a profile folder with my username plus a suffix extension of the new domain name.
The client machine is Windows 7 Ultimate, the old server was SBS 2003, and the new server is SBS 2011.