Migrating User Profiles from Old Domain to New DomainMustBeGeek

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Migrating user profiles from old domain to new domain can be very important tasks if an enterprise is going through some major upgrades. For example, lot of enterprises still have Windows XP installed on their user’s system. So they might want to migrate to Windows 7/8 from good old Windows XP. So here, I will show steps to migrate user profiles from Windows XP machine to Windows 7 to the new domain. You might find other ways to transfer user profiles, like copying the user profile folders and changing registry settings. This methods works when transferring user profiles from one Windows XP machine to other Windows XP machine in new domain. But this method doesn’t work if you have to transfer user profiles from Windows XP machine to Windows 7 machine. So here comes Windows Easy Transfer application. Windows Easy Transfer is a free tool from Microsoft that let’s you migrate user profiles from Windows XP/7/8 to Windows 7/8.

Migrating User Profiles from Old Domain to New Domain

Windows Easy Transfer application easily allows you to migrate user profile from one computer/domain to another computer/domain. You can download Windows Easy Transfer for Windows XP from Microsoft site. There are two versions of this application, 32-bit and 64-bit.

Goal: To migrate user profiles from Windows XP in old domain to Windows 7 in new domain.

Make sure you download the proper version. Download and install Windows Easy Transfer in old domain’s Windows XP. Now run the Windows Easy Transfer Application. You will see the following first screen.

You can read the information and click Next button. On the next screen you are asked to choose different media types to transfer the files. Like this,

Here choose the media. I will click an external hard disk or USB flash drive. You can save it in your C or D drive as well by choosing this option. You will then see following screen,

Since this is Windows XP, you will see only one option, i.e. this is my old computer. Click the option and you will get following screen.

All the existing user’s profiles are scanned. After the scan is complete you can check or uncheck the user profiles and click Next button. Here, I will check the domain user profile only. You will then see following screen.

You can enter the password to safeguard the user profile or you can leave it blank and click Save button. Here, I will leave blank and click Save button. You will then be prompt to choose the location to save the profile. I will choose C drive and click Save button. Now you will see following screen,

As you can see here the user profile has 34.9 GB files and its being saved to the disk. Notice the user Administrator is not doing any processing because I had unchecked it on previous step because I only wanted this user’s profile to be backed up. After the transfer is complete click finish button. You are now ready to import files in your new machine or in new domain.

Now go to Windows 7 PC. Open Windows Easy Transfer application. The application comes pre-installed in Windows 7. Click Next on Welcome page. Choose external hard disk or USB flash drive. Then choose this is my new PC.