I just installed an additional hard drive into my Windows 7 PC and want to move the home directory (D:UsersName) to the new hard drive. To do this, I robocopied the old directory to the new drive (keeping file attributes, permissions and skipping junctions) and changed the location in the HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionProfileList registry key as described here. Now when I log in, I am greeted by a temporary user profile and the event log suggests that Windows can not find the local profile (EventId 1511), being as unhelpful as ever and offering no further information. Of course the path that I set in the registry exists and has the same permissions as the old directory (as far as I can tell), so I can’t understand why Windows can’t find it. You will probably tell me that I should just give up and move only the documents/pictures/etc folders. This isn’t acceptable to me because countless applications put config files directly into the home directory. I am 100% certain that it’s possible to do this, because the directory that I’m moving it from was already on a separate drive. I managed to do it a few years ago in the same way.
Does anyone have an idea what the problem could be? I can only guess that the drive somehow isn’t mounted when the user profile is loaded, but the drive properties look identical. Perhaps Windows assumes that H: is never a local drive?
