Re: Best way to migrate ALL win XP apps & data to NEW laptop?

Pete wrote:

>>You say that you keep all your docs and settings on the data partition. A
>>lot of applications put their files somewhere under <system
>>drive>:\Documents and Settings\<user> and have no option to change that.
>>I've never found out how to put the whole Documents and Settings\<user>
>>tree on a different drive. How do you do that?

> To move the whole profile look at:
>
> http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=322014

Yes, thanks, I've seen that before (not too long ago, tho). I'd like to
know someone who actually did that :)

My doubt is how many applications are out there that expect the user
profile directory to be C:\Documents and Settings\<user> and don't really
care about the registry entries.

For example one inconsistency is that in "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList" there is a value ProfilesDirectory with the
data "%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings". Now one would assume that the
individual profile directories refer to this setting, but no: in the key
....\ProfileList\<SID> the value ProfileImagePath has a data of
"%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\<user>". So changing
"HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfilesDirectory" would seemingly not change
"HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\<SID>\ProfileImagePath -- even though it
seems to be dependent on it.

To make a long story short: I'd like to get some first-hand feedback on how
messy this procedure is :)

And another thing: At the point where I am (running a system for quite a
while), the path to the home directory is probably not only in the registry
in text form, but also in all kinds of application configuration files in
text and binary form, full path or only parts of it, with or without using
system variable names. So changing that now is probably going to give me
trouble, but changing right after a clean minimal install might work. In
any case, real-world experience seems quite important.

Gerhard
.

Relevant Pages

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