[geeks] Moving users from one domain to another...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 13 May 2002, Jonathan Eisch wrote:

> I have a couple windows 98, 2000 and XP systems that have been running on
> one domain for a while, with all the user profiles stored locally, and now I
> need to move those systems, with their respective users and profiles to
> another domain.  How would I go about doing that?

Aside from doing it manually (backing up all the files, making an ASCII
dump of the users' registry entries), I don't think you can.  The GUIDs
for each user will change upon changing the domain, and NT/2000 will balk
at any sort of automatic conversion.

> I've tried just renaming the folder under windows XP, but that hasn't
> worked.  I'm moving from a NT 4.0 domain to a windows 2000 server
> (with the active directory stuff), if that makes any difference.

The proper way to do this is to upgrade the NT server to 2000 using
domains, and then migrate the domain into the Active Directory tree.
After that, you -might- be able to move the individual users between
branches of the tree, but I still think it's going to throw a hissy-fit at
the changes in GUIDs.

Grain of salt: It's been a while since I've attended the NT school of B&D,
so there might be a much easier method that I'm overlooking.

--Jonathan