Windows - Copy domain profile to local profile

[Administrator]

How to convert your Domain Profile to a Local Profile

This is useful when you have been doing consultant work on your own laptop, while joined to a clients domain, and you wish to leave said company while still retaining all the work and setting you had while joined to their domain.

I’ve found doing a manual transfer to be more reliable then using the inbuilt profile copy (the one where you go into profiles and right click copy) and personally i haven found USMT (user state migration tool) to miss stuff or just totally screw up the new profile.

To manually copy the profile over here are the steps.

1. know the name of the folder of the original domain profile.

2. log onto your computer locally as your new account (you don’t have to leave the domain to do this)

3. know the name of the folder for your new local account.

4. reboot the computer (important as files could be left open from either account and not be able to be copied or copied over)

5. log on as a different user from the above with local admin rights.

6. go into the domain folder profile (it would be under C:\Documents and Settings\domainusername)

7. highlight the contents of this folder and and copy all (make sure everything is unhidden)

8. go into the folder of the new local account and paste everything on top

(Note, this will destroy everything in the current local account, so best to use a new local account to do this) (the reason why we paste the contents of the folder and not the folder itself or just rename the folder is because the local folder you are in now as a special SID associated with the local account)

9. since your logged in as the local admin now, make sure you check to make sure your new local account is a local admin as well

10. reboot the computer and log in as the local user, make sure everything looks correct, the best way to make sure everything worked is make sure your desktop background is correct, go into my documents and make sure you can see all the documents you had in there, if you cannot, then it sounds like a rights issue which is easily fixed.

11. If everything is not working now, it’s a rights issue, open up windows explorer, go to your folder (the one under documents and settings) right click on your folder, go to the permissions, take ownership of the entire folder and child contents, then add your admin rights to the folder and all child contents.

Reboot again and you should have your entire domain profile copied over to your local profile, the thing i like about this method is it also leaves your original domain profile intact just in case of any issues (as long as you have the hard disk space.

[Administrator]

Alternate method-  create a new local admin user and then log in to it.
Open regedit and browse to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
Under the SID for the new user, change the profile path to the location of your current profile.

Then run unjoin (download it) and reboot. When you log in to the new local user, all the settings under the old domain profile will be used.