Copy Profile to Default

[NewComer]

When I was working on windows XP then I can copy a customize profile into default profile. I just installed Windows 7 and it is not allowing me to do the same. Have you any way to do it because I need to enable to copy a the profile.

Thanks

[Eric B]

I have checked the workaround on Windows 7 and it performed really well. It is a little time consuming process than clicking on <Copy To> but it does the exact thing. What you are doing is:

* Manually copying the profile folder to the file server.
* Put a new name on it, e.g. Mandatory.V2 (the V2 is needed for Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008/2008 R2
* Deleting AppData\Local and AppData\LocalLow from the new profile on the file server.
* Opening REGEDIT on the file server and loading the hive from NTUSER.DAT in the profile.
* Configure the permissions on the loaded hive: remove the old user and add in a group.
* Unloading the hive.
* Renaming NTUSER.DAT in the mandatory profile to NTUSER.MAN
* Changing the user object's to work with a roaming profile, e.g. \\fileserver\profiles$\mandatory. Note that .V2 is not described here. It is silent. Vista, etc know to add it. XP, etc would not use it.

[Glenny]

There are some effective steps to do it and I think it would be really helpful for you to achieve your task. Just create a new and set it properly, after setting up the profile for one user, named the account as "Spoon", do the following:

1. Login as an admin but Spoon should not be used for login.
2. Move to c: drive with the help of Explorer, Press the ALT key, go to Tools Menu => Folder Options and start unchecking "Hides" so Explorer will detect entire files (system, hidden and what not).
3. Go to Users\ and rename "Default" to "Default Back".
4. Make a copy of "spoon" and rename the copy of "spoon" (not original one) into "Default".
5. Right click on "Default" and change the permissions for "Everyone" and "Users" groups have "Read & Execute", "List Folder Content" and "Read" NTFS permissions.
6. Now login as an normal account that does not already contains a profile settings. If the new user's profile looks like the setting you did for "spoon", all is good in the hood.

[JonathanD]

The default location of user profile within Windows 7 is still similar procedure of Vista, in the location of c:\users folder, which I always find it seems quite dumb keeping user profiles in the similar partition as the system, especially when I save number of day-to-day files in my user profile, rather than another folder in another partition.

So the first step to continue this process would be happened after installing the OS on my own system is always to change the default location to another partition before I actually start setting up my profile.

[Macarenas]

You need to go through the steps to do this. Create a new account named as Test - Log into that account, The login specified that the profile has been created - Restart.

Now Log into the old account - Right Click on My Computer - choose Property- choose Advanced System Settings - Click on Settings within User Profile- Now choose the test profile. As you would see the Copy to is grayed out. This is necessary for business purpose, what I do is I configure how a profile should look with all the reg hacks and what icons required to be on the desktop or now on the taskbar with windows 7. Once that is done, I log out of that account and log into a new account and do a copy to the default profile.