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Cannot change default location for profiles directory in winxp

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TtOoWwAa

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Hi,

I was reading up on how to enable windows to move the profilesdirectory location to a folder other than documents and settings but for some reason it just wont work, the accounts are still in Documents and settings.

I definetley think the reg edit option is a no go because I've tried every possible thing I have seen or can think of in the smaller options but no luck. The main thing is that you set profileimagepath on each key under profilelist to the new profiles directory location.

I want to create 'groups' of users that will be in a directory so if I have user1@domain and user2@domain they can be in a certain folder where as others like remote or roaming users or whatever can be in another folder however it should be possible to share NT services between two groupings.

I don't really want to use sysprep because the windows installer is hard wired to set the profilesdirectory to documents and settings anyhow despite sysprep letting me run commands just after the installer is finished but before log on.

I read up on using junctions or symbolic links but it didn't work when I installed the program to create symbolic links and I'm not sure if another computer on a network will see them since they are not supported in OSX/Linux/windows vista or below as default and if the remote computer ried it might not be able to access the folder(s)

So, I'm out of ideas now, do you have anything I can try?
 
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Hi.

Afaik there is no known way to move the default location for the user profile folder.

However, you can always create a junction point to redirect each single profile folder t. another location. Known Windows limitation: It HAVE to be locally, a network path just won't work.

A junction is similar to a link to a folder, exept from that windows - unlike regular links (lnk files) - threat junction points as if it was a real folder.
That means that you can get the contents of "D:\YourName" to show under "C:\Documents and settings\YourName" as well.

There is some tools out there that let you do that. I personally prefer **broken link removed**that have an UI for creating Junction points in folders.

[edit]
Junction points does notr work on Fat file systems. You need to have NTFS (but who doesn't?)
 
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Thanks for the reply I got it working today after a new weeks of trying, I created a system envriroment variable called %subfoldername% and I set its value as '%systemdrive%\Documents and settings\subfoldername

Then I just typed %subfoldername% in any users profileimagepath in regedit and set the 'profilesdirectory' value in the root of the 'profilelist' key also to %subfoldername% then I was able to cut everything from documents and settings to that subfolder with no errors at all.

This worked perfect as it moved everything I wanted and that is needed like all users or more so, 'default user' as it would not have worked if Default user could not find the user to mask if it was in a different folder to that user.
 
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