Archive for August, 2009

How to move Documents and Settings to another partition or drive.

// August 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Some people have wondered how to do it so here we go:

  1. Create a new temporary Administrative account, reboot your PC and log-in under the new profile. Include this account in the changes below unless stated otherwise.
  2. Open Regedit and modify the following key to point to your new profile location (e.g. D:\):
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfilesDirectory
  3. Expand ProfileList and modify the following key in each profile (except S-1-5-18), replacing C:\Documents and Settings with the new profile location:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\<profile>\ProfileImagePath
  4. Navigate to the key below and modify all string values so as C:\Documents and Settings points to the new profile location:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\*
  5. Close Regedit, open Explorer (be sure you can view hidden files, including system) and copy all profiles (except LocalService(XP), NetworkService(XP) and the temporary profile you are using) from C:\Documents and Settings to the new profile location.
  6. Reboot your PC; log-in as Administrator and remove the temporary profile; and then delete C:\Documents and Settings.

Microsoft releases Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner

// August 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // SBS 2008, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008

This tool is great for any consultant or IT technician who needs to validate a domain’s health before going through an upgrade process.    This is just one more tool that Microsoft has released that makes our job even easier.  Here’s a description courtesy of Microsoft:

“The Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner is a diagnostic tool that is designed for administrators of small or medium-sized networks (recommended up to 20 servers and up to 500 client computers) who want to assess the overall health of their network infrastructure. The tool identifies common problems that can prevent your network environment from functioning properly as well as problems that can interfere with infrastructure upgrades, deployments, and migration.

When run from a computer with the proper network access, the tool takes a few minutes to scan your IT environment, perform more than 100 separate checks, and collect and analyze information about the following:

  • Configuration of sites and subnets in Active Directory
  • Replication of Active Directory, the file system, and SYSVOL shared folders
  • Name resolution by the Domain Name System (DNS)
  • Configuration of the network adapters of all domain controllers, DNS servers, and e-mail servers running Microsoft Exchange Server
  • Health of the domain controllers
  • Configuration of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) for all domain controllers”

You can download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dd7a00df-1a5b-4fb6-a8a6-657a7968bd11&displaylang=en