User Profiles - Create and Move During Windows 7 Installation

Thanks for this info. I just wanted to confirm that it still works this way in Windows 8 RTM. I've only tried on 64bit pro, but working a charm.

Unfortunately, I had (two days ago) already installed Windows 7 Ult x64 SP1 before discovering this forum. I also have all the drivers for my motherboard/video cards installed as well. If I want to try the "post Windows 7 install" procedure to move my Users and ProgramData folders now, should I wait to install the 100+ additional Windows Updates since SP1 or doesn't it matter. Further, I have a UEFI motherboard and Windows 7 is installed on an SSD configured as GPT, not MBR. I have not installed any other software yet. Also, the system is joined to a domain. Does anyone have any opinions or experience or concerns regarding my situation and moving the two folders. Thank you for any help/suggestions.

Thanks Gary...

I decided to take the plunge and follow the procedure for moving Users and ProgramData after Windows 7 was already installed. Since I hadn’t yet gone too far in completing my installation (loading various apps, etc,) I figured it was something I could risk. I un-joined the domain first and the process went smoothly enough…I thought I noticed an extra reboot during “preparing your computer for first use,” but SysPrep worked exactly as explained in the tutorial. I had trouble getting a profile for my (domain) user account when joining the domain again. Windows 7 kept creating a temporary profile for that account. After a quick search, I found that I had to edit the registry to get rid of a backup entry for the previous instance of the domain user account. Works perfectly now.

Thanks, Kari, for the thorough research and write-up for both cases.

Hello everyone, especially Kari, very nice tutorial you have here.

However it's not working for me. Everything behaves like said in tutorial, except that after running script with sysprep and restarting nothing has changed. Both Users and ProgramData are still on C: disk.

I might say that i don't have SSD disk, so it's more like i want to separate those data from system partition. Also i don't care much about data in those folders, stuff i care about i store somewhere else.

I rather wrote down whole list of clean installation, in case i missed something important.

1) I created bootable USB with Win7 Enterprise 32bit and booted from it. Could this be an issue somehow ? You are mentioning CD/DVD only all the time.

2) Once booted on screen with language selection, i hit Shift+F10 and run diskpart in command line. I selected disk for installation and ran "clean all" (according to this: SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation).

3) Once completed (after 3 hours) i created and formatted 200MB "System Reserved" partition followed by 60GB "Windows 7" partition and rest of space (630GB) filled with partition "Data". I had assigned letters C a D as usual, leaving first small without letter.

4) Now finally back to Win installation. In the screen with selection of partition it all looks kinda odd. I see there twice "Unallocated Space" of size "0.0" at the beginning and end of the list. Every partition contains some data already, it shows free space little bit lower than total size. System Reserved has only 182MB free and other two are smaller by 0.1GB. Not sure if that means something. Anyway, i picked "Windows 7" partition and hit Next.

5) After first reboot i had set bios back to boot from HDD. Installation continues, there is second reboot and once i get to screen for entering username, i hit Ctrl+Shift+F3 without typing anything else, computer reboots.

6) In audit mode i confirmed network as Home and Cancel next screen with sharing and homegroup. Than i Cancel sysprep tool dialog window.

7) Folder Options and enabled showing hidden files and file extensions.

8) C:\Users exists and contains Administrator, Public and Default subfolders. Directory C:\ProgramData some Microsoft stuff.

9) Created relocate.xml file to root of D: disk and checked all settings. I created D:\internals folder as i want to have both of those in there.

10) Finally ran the script with sysprep.exe as stated in tutorial, it restarted and after restart both folders are still in place... :/

I am not sure what purpose has offlineImage there, but i even tried copying content from usb stick to D drive and changing path to it, in case the usb is not available for some reason. Didn't helped.

Also i tried to shortening paths to usual D:\Users and D:\ProgramData, same result.

I know, i have added "internals" as i want to have both folders in D:\internals subfolder and not just in root. I presumed it doesn't much matter which path i select there and i could even rename Users to Profiles or something else. Anyway as i said, i tried it without "internals" with same result.