Using USMT 4.0 and ConfigMgr 2007 while migrating from local profiles to partially redirected profiles

This time I want to devote a post to a situation I haven’t been in that often. The customer was migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7, well.. nothing special here, but also migrating from local profiles to (partially) redirected profiles, well.. that’s a challenge. So to capture the userdata AND -settings we had to come up with something special. Of course we could do some things with scripting, but the biggest challenge was the fact that the new (partially redirected) profile location was only available after the first logon to Windows 7.

With this information I started thinking about USMT 4.0 again. Most often you use this to migrate on a computer basis, but we made an exception on this. We came up with the following five steps that should do the trick:

  1. (On Windows XP) A batch file that kicks of Scanstate. Nothing special here, just used /uel:1 or /uel:0 to get the user profile we need (0=Logged on user, 1=Modified accounts last 24 hours).
  2. (On Windows XP) A batch file that copies the captured data and settings to the users share on the network.
  3. (On Windows 7) A batch file that copies the captured data and settings back to a local drive.
  4. (On Windows 7) A batch file that kicks of Loadstate. Nothing special here, just used /ue to exclude some possible captured local/ admin account.
  5. (On Windows 7) A batch file that copies the last bits of data straight in to the redirected profile.

The important part is something a didn’t mention yet. In the migration XML files there is the possibility to copy data to an alternative location and that’s what we used for the parts of the profile that would get redirected. The reason for that is simple, because the SYSTEM account has no security rights to write something to there, as it is a network location. Here is a sample of the part we added to the migration XML files:

<locationModify script="MigXmlHelper.RelativeMove(‘%CSIDL_DESKTOP%\’, ‘C:\Temp\Desktop’)">
   <objectSet>
      <pattern type="File">%CSIDL_DESKTOP%\* [*]</pattern>
   </objectSet>    
</locationModify>

This specific part would copy the desktop items to C:\Temp\Desktop instead of the desktop location in the (redirected) profile. Also important to note is that, in this case, all the copy actions have to run with user rights, as it’s all copied to the users directory.

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