Relocating Microsoft Windows NT users’ profiles postinstall

One peculiarity of administering Microsoft Windows NT is the alleged infeasibility of relocating the directory containing users’ profiles (%systemdrive%\Documents and Settings\* in Microsoft Windows XP by default) to another HDD partition postinstall.

There is a cheap and dirty hack to perform the trick, provided you possess some basic administrative skills in both standard OSes and in Microsoft Windows NT. At least this works for Microsoft Windows XP Professional Sp3.

1.1) Boot into Microsoft Windows NT and log in as an administrator.

1.2) Create a directory at the root of %systemdrive%. %systemdrive%\home will be a neat name.

1.3) Mount your prospective home partition with %systemdrive%\home as the mounting point.

2.1) Reboot into a standard OS capable of RW access to NTFS (LiveCD or perhaps LiveUSB of almost any popular GNU/Linux distro will do). Log in as root. Mount both MSWin %systemdrive% and your prospective MSWin home partition.

2.2) Copy %systemdrive%/Documents and Settings/* recursively to the root of your prospective MSWin home partition.

2.3) Rename %systemdrive%/Documents and Settings to, say, %systemdrive%/Documents and Settings.old.

2.4) Rename %systemdrive%/home to %systemdrive%/Documents and Settings.

3) Reboot back to Microsoft Windows NT and log in as an administrator. Double-check permissions to the users' profiles and clean up %systemdrive%\Documents and Settings.old.

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