Moving User Profile Hives

The hives for user profiles can be located anywhere on a local or remote computer. In some circumstances, you might want to move a user profile hive to another computer when User Profile Editor is not available. You can move a user profile by copying the hive to the new location, and then changing the Registry to specify the new location.

To change a user profile location in the Registry

1. Log on under a username other than the one for the profile you want to move.
2. Use File Manager to copy the hive and .LOG files for the profile you want to move. This file can be on a floppy disk or on a shared network drive.
3. In Registry Editor, display the Registry for the computer where this hive will be used, and change the value of ProfileImagePath under the appropriate ProfileList\SID_# subkey to specify the new path and filename for the new hive. The full Registry path for this subkey is the following:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
   \ProfileList\SID_#

   The data type for ProfileImagePath is REG_EXPAND_SZ, so you can specify a value in the form of %SystemRoot%\system32\config\hiveFilename. Do not include the double backslash (\\) to specify the UNC path name.

The next time that user logs on, the new user profile will be used.

Important For secure installations, user profile hives should be stored on an NTFS volume where they can be secured by specifying access permission in File Manager.

For more information about the ProfileList subkey, see the REGENTRY.HLP file, which is included on the Resource Kit disk.