User profiles windows 7 location

I have the same question Report abuse. Details required :. Cancel Submit. Ronnie Vernon. Here are a few links to other threads discussing this issue. How satisfied are you with this reply? Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site. Added the new user account. Logged out of Admin and into the new user account. All good. I was worried that it would try to restore everything back to their exact original locations that would be bad which included some things on the C: drive AppData and whatnot and the rest to the D: drive Desktop, Downloads, My Documents, etc… It did not.

It took into account that everything from the old profile should now be placed in the new profile location. Custom settings transferred too. I think the only thing I had to fix was what default programs I wanted certain file types to open with. No big deal. However, Migration Wizard allows you to restore to a different profile name if you want. I think it was under some advanced button or something during the restore. Hmm, this ended up being much longer than I intended.

Anyway, hope all that answer the question and helps someone. Thanks for laying this out step-by-step. I have two questions for you:. First, did you have any problems with applications that reference the original path for user profile? Second, I stumbled upon what appears to be a Windows 7 option for this exact operation, but was curious whether anyone else had tried this and if so with what results. Done it a while back for someone on Vista to leave him with an image so he could restore his PC to the state I handed it to him and his data would be kept on a different partition.

Followed the instructions as shown by you, just that when i copied the folders from C: to D: I ran the Explorer as Admin. Now I'm asking myself how I could delete that C:Users folder, after I have created a new Admin account with which I intend to work and having deleted that, let me call it admin-account-created-by-windows-during-installation as I see no need for it any more?

When I try to do so, I'm getting an error message regarding the libraries, those meta-folders. When i double click the admin-account-created-by-windows-during-installation user folder it's empty, still showing a lock on it though. It tried to become the owner with the according right to do so, not sure what I did there and if it worked but still can't delete it — still that library error message — won't let me remove the whole folder.

I don't think copying profiles from one drive to another would move everything over ideally. It may still leave things behind in the original folder. I would suggest leaving these folders as they are. Hope they don't bother you too much. At least, they haven't bothered me. Great tips here guys!

I could also use some help. What I want to do is just have the essential Windows files on the SSD and keep everything else the same. I think you understand what I am asking here?

I dont think ur instructions are very clear after all, am I supposed to create a new folder in the new directory called User, and then copy the Default folder and Public Folders to it? I have one concern, can I have the profiles in D drive where D is protected by bitlock encryption? When I use this method, I get an error when I set up a new user and then try to log into that new user.

It says that it cannot access the new user's profile location, that it might be on another network etc. I look in the users directory and there is no folder created for the new user. I even tried resetting the permissions on the new users folder 'e:users' to match those for the c:users folder and subfolders , but this didn't help either. Any thoughts? Wanted to do this just to have my user profile and more importantly the appdata directory on my mechanical 1.

After installing win 7, changed just the 'profilesdirectory' setting from the default to d:users. Created a new account. Logged into it and then changed the registry setting back to default. Then started to install programs. Then ran into an issue that I did not have before when running the with my user profile on the c: drive in win 7. That is that some programs that worked, now complain that they cannot write to the HDD. Speedfan gives errors after it's detection run, saying it cannot write to various files.

COD says 'Modern warefare 2could not write a file. The hard drive is probably full'. But if I run them both as administrator or change the permissions of their directories in Program Files x86 to allow users write access no more error messages. Also to test further I created another account using the default registry settings, so put's the account in the c:users dir. When I log into this account I no longer have to mess around with running as admin or changing permissions to get these to programs to work.

They work in the default non admin, user mode. Am not desperate to install any more programs while this issue exists. Thanks for the tip. A copy from the GUI won't do this. Without that you can run into troubles; i. I just did the same thing. In addition, all the applications in the start menu went missing. And you didn't see any pics available when you created the user. All fixed now. But I created my new user with that mistake — going to kill and recreate the user anew just in case!

I just tried this fix on Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit and it did not work. I have a new Windows 7 system and there is no possibility this will work. Even though I boot up in a different account, when I try to copy the account I want copied from within the User Profiles window, the Copy To button is disabled.

Copy it manually is not all possible. Even if I were somehow overcome the permissions bug it certainly looks like a bug , I can't see how I could copy the registry hives. Even a working Windows doesn't let you copy that.

Thank you so much! I just installed windows 7 on a clean hard drive and followed your simple steps. Now my disk allocations are so much more efficient, organized, and easy to work with. Going into the future, there is nothing like doing it right the first time. I successfully transferred the Users folder to my D Drive in Vista a couple of years ago. I now want to upgrade to Win 7 professional. Will the in-place upgrade option preserve the settings I have in Vista, or over-ride to the default?

As many users confirm, the described procedure works. However I have a question. Being logged in as Administrator I see 5 directories in the C:Users. But should the first statement be interpreted in the similar way? However xcopy puts for each symbolic link in the source directory not a copy of symbolic link but copy of the file linked by it. C:UsersDefault directory contains many links, thus the copy on D: will be different than original directory on C:.

Is it a copy of C:UsersDefault locked during the session and destroyed after logout, so we can ignore it? I went through your process, restarted and was locked out. After much head scratching and fiddling in safe mode, I realised it was an IDT error. This is a brief look into how Windows keeps track of where each user's profile is stored, along with some tips on how to use this knowledge to troubleshoot issues with user profile issues.

A common mistake that people make is assuming that this is done based on the username, which is understandable because in the majority of cases a user's profile directory will be named the same as their username. This is because there are a few scenarios where the user profile will not be the same as the directory name.

Perhaps a profile directory with that name already exists - this commonly happens with the Administrator account as you have the local Administrator account's profile and then the domain Administrator account's profile and both have the same username.

As they both have different SIDs though, this doesn't matter. When Windows is setting up the profile for a user remember this only happens when they log on for the first time, so you won't already have a local Administrator profile if you never logged on with that account and realises a folder with that name already exists, it simply appends the domain name or the domain name plus a number if that already exists too to the new profile name. If you look in this key you will see several subkeys - one for each user profile on that computer, and each named with the SID of the account that it is for.

The longer SIDs are 'real' user accounts, both local and domain. If you look inside one of these keys you will see a few values, one is named ProfileImagePath and this holds the path to the user's profile directory see screenshot for example.

So this is an easy way to identify which user account this SID corresponds to and this is also the way that Windows determines which profile to load when a user logs on.

So you could actually have a profile directory named anything you wanted, it does not have to be the user's username, as long as the subkey in the registry location mentioned above that is named with the user's SID has its ProfileImagePath value pointing to that directory then it will work. I'm sure many of you have used the same trick I used to use when I wanted a user to get a new profile created for whatever reason - I would just rename their existing profile directory to something different, then the next time they logged on Windows would realise it cannot find the profile and create a new one and I could copy the relevant files from their old profile directory into their new profile directory.

With Windows 7 however, MS changed this behaviour. Instead of creating a new profile and carrying on as normal, if Windows 7 cannot find your profile then you will get a warning message explaining that you are going to be logged on with a temporary profile - meaning any changes you make to the profile will be lost when you log off.