User Profiles - Create and Move During Windows 7 Installation

derekimo · 19 Jan 2012

Amicus said:

Kari,

Very well done regarding your posts............very clear, and very easy to understand!

Background:
My nothing unusual basic setup as delivered:
New Laptop - HP Pavilion G6 running W7 Home Premium 64 bit, pre-installed by OEM on 1 TB SATA drive:

System 199 MB NTFS (System, Active, Primary Partition)
(C:) 912.66 GB NTFS (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
Recovery (D:) 14.70 GB NTFS (Primary Partition)
HP_TOOLS (E:) 3.97 GB FAT32 (Primary Partition)

My initial alterations:
Straight out of the box, cleaned (de-bloated), no other software whatsoever installed yet, not connected to internet. Drive re., partitioned very smoothly with Partition Wizard (nice little tool):

System 199 MB NTFS (System, Active, Primary Partition)
(C:) 100.00 GB NTFS (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Logical Drive)
Data (G:) 406.33 GB NTFS (Logical Drive)
Multimedia (H:) 406.33 GB NTFS (Logical Drive)
Recovery (D:) 14.70 GB NTFS (Primary Partition)
HP_TOOLS (E:) 3.97 GB FAT32 (Primary Partition)

All now backed up and cloned.

Current Position:
Chose to move only the location of "Users" to Data (G:), leaving ProgramData on (C:), and therefore deleted the appropriate line re., ProgramData from the XML-script. Edited the other parts of the script as per Tutorial to suit my particular circumstances. Followed all of your instructions to the letter using all of your posts and the Tutorial (page 4 onwards).............all apparently went to plan.............no errors, correct boots etc., etc., etc., except...................."Users" still remain stubbornly on (C:). Tried four times now, and each time with the same result.

With all of the above in mind, I very much suspect that this has absolutely nothing to do with any re-partitioning, and everything to do with the fact that it is an OEM pre-installed OS without any OS installation disks supplied (as is usual in such circumstances). I have made the usual 'one-off' set of recovery disks (4 disks in total) for future reinstallation if necessary, and I have therefore had to use those in lieu of an original OS disk.

Checking this through, I cannot locate "install.wim" anywhere at all on any of the recovery disks, or on any of the hard drive partitions, which would appear to make the "offlineImage cpi:source" part of the XML-script useless. Windows Explorer does not allow a detailed analysis of the contents of the recovery disks, or the Recovery (D:) partition, only displaying the headline icons for the file contents...........don't know if I've explained that well enough, but anyway, you'll know exactly what I mean if you've ever explored a typical recovery disk set created via an OEM installation.

Any thoughts and / or ideas?
What can I do to make this a success?
Have you or anyone else experienced this problem and then successfully resolved it?

Bearing in mind the vast number of OEM pre-installed OS laptops being sold, there is probably an equally vast number of other owners out there with exactly the same problem, tearing their hair out wondering how to make your method work for them.

H E L P pleeeease! :confused:

Thanks,

Amicus

Welcome to the forum Amicus,

You can disable smilies to get of rid them when not needed.

Amicus · 19 Jan 2012

Thks Derekimo,

Good to join in, although I wish I was providing a helpful contribution rather than with a newbie question!

Cheers,

A

(Smileys now disabled)

derekimo · 19 Jan 2012

Amicus said:

Thks Derekimo,

Good to join in, although I wish I was providing a helpful contribution rather than with a newbie question!

Cheers,

A

(Smileys now disabled)

You're welcome, we're all newbies at one time or another.

It would be pretty boring if we already knew everything.

Britton30 · 19 Jan 2012

Welcome Amicus, Derek's right we gotta start somewhere. I joined because I had a noob issue with Win 7, got it solved and hung around to annoy people.

Amicus · 19 Jan 2012

Greetings Britton30,

Thks.........I can only aspire to be a similar stalwart. Ya' never know!

Kari · 20 Jan 2012

Britton30 said:

In THIS for example, is that the entire script to convert to a xml file or a modification of the larger one from the tutorial?

Sorry, my bad, explained that badly.

It means that change that part in the answer file that I have highlighted red, the drive/path. Other than that you run sysprep with this answer file as told in the tutorial.

Let's break those four lines of the script apart:

First, as in HTML and other languages, an XML answer file needs tags to start a procedure and end it. Start tag syntax is <TagName>, and end tag </TagName>. As you can see, it's almost as tags we use here at SF; if you want bold text in your post you need a start tag [B] so text here between start and end tags is shown bold, and an end tag [/B].

In sysprep answer file "language" the tag name in this case is FolderLocations. Between the FolderLocations tabs you tell A) which system folders to move and B) where to move them.

Each system folder we move must be inside its own tags. The tag name for Users folder is ProfilesDirectory and for the ProgramData the tag is simply called ProgramData.

So, the syntax of these four lines in this answer file is:

Start tag for relocating system folders
Start tag for Users folder - new location of Users folder - end tag for Users folder
Start tag for ProgramData folder - new location of ProgramData folder - end tag for ProgramData folder
End tag for relocating system folders

Or in XML:

<FolderLocations>
<ProfilesDirectory>X:\Users</ProfilesDirectory>
<ProgramData>X:\ProgramData</ProgramData>
</FolderLocations>
(X = the drive where you want these folders to be moved)

An example scenario:

You have relocated both Users and ProgramData to D: using the method and answer file told in this tutorial. For one or another reason you need to restore both folders to their original, default location C:

You simply boot to Audit Mode (if still not known how, read post# 22 again), edit the answer file to set new folder locations between the FolderLocations tags, and run sysprep using the modified answer file, as told in tutorial starting from page 4.

Notice that in this case both folders usually already contain some files. The more content those folders have, the more time this takes, for Windows must now move not only the (empty) folders but also everything in them.

Good luck and a lot of patience!

Kari

Britton30 · 20 Jan 2012

thanks Kari, that helps a lot! I appreciate it and will give it a try. This is for the wife's PC and she can afford the space on the SSD for ProgramData.

Amicus · 21 Jan 2012

Hi Kari,

Any chance you could look at the particular problem presented in my original post 1 day ago?

If you can solve it, I feel certain that it would assist countless others in this situation, not just me.

Thanks in anticipation.

Kari · 21 Jan 2012

Hi Amicus, welcome to the Seven Forums.

Simply, you can not sysprep the system without install media. Please find either an install DVD for your Windows 7 edition, or download a Windows 7 ISO image for your edition and burn it to DVD.

Kari

Amicus · 21 Jan 2012

Hi Kari,

Good to talk with you!

I fully appreciate your comment re., install media, but as other contributers have said before me, I do indeed have install media and have tried to use it.............that is to say, the recovery disk set made in the usual way as recommended by the OEM...............surely all necessary install media is contained within the recovery disk set, otherwise any recovery, clean or repair, would fail?

If that is correct, "install.wim" will be present within the recovery disk set media...............we just need to work out a method of telling Sysprep to find it? Or perhaps OEM's use do not use "install.wim" as part of the installation commands?

Thanks.

Amicus