upgraded to Sandy Bridge motherboard -- used sysprep -- lost user profile

[LongTimePCUser]

I switched to a new Sandy Bridge motherboard.

This is a repost. I had posted this to the motherboard forum and was advised to move it here.

I used sysprep before shutting down old Win 7 Home Premium system.

Installed new motherboard.
Started up.
Success. Sort of.
Windows 7 started up and asked me to create a new user. Did it.
Rebooted and switched to previous user which was still there. (myName)
Windows created default desktop.

All previous user settings were gone.
The files are still there in c:\users\myName.
But the new "myName" user does not point to the existing cusers\myName directory and desktop.

Is there some way to fix this? Maybe a registry setting to point user "myName" to correct files?

 

[Dahak]

Not easily, I had ran into a similar issue where the user profile was not pointing to the proper folder.

Just for the less headache, just create a new user and move over all of your data from the old profile to the new user

 

[LongTimePCUser]

I gave up on sysprep.
I had a full Acronis backup from the previous day.
I did a restore. (8 hours over night across my LAN).

Plan B: plug & pray that Windows 7 is smart enough to fix itself.
It did.
I booted the Win 7 that was set up for the older mother board.
It booted and installed a few drivers.
I rebooted and it then installed many drivers.

Net results: Win 7 is fine. All settings and files were back.

 

[imagoon]

Sysprep is a tool used to develop deployable "fresh out of the box" configurations. It axes the user profile information stored in the registry, wipes any security information, and makes the system rerun the initial setup (among a lot more things). You were using the wrong tool for the job.

 

[JackMDS]

Yap, Acronis True Image does all these things correctly in most cases.

Cloning, and moving HDs and Platforms is the One type of activity that One does not want to save the $60 that True Image 2011 Plus costs.