[Gllug] OT - Booting XP to commandline

[Ken Smith]

Paul Cupis wrote:
> Dylan wrote:
>   
>> I'm doing some maintenance to a friend's Win-XP-Pro machine, and need to boot 
>> to a DOS interface if possible. I remember being ablr to use a function key 
>> at boot time, but for the life of me cannot figure out how to do it right 
>> now.
>>     
>
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315222
>
>   
>> Any hints? Basically, I need to copy the Documents and Settings from the C 
>> drive to a newly installed data drive to recover disk space and since Windows 
>> acesses several of the relevant files it will not let me copy them ... Using 
>> a Linux boot CD is not an option since all drives are formatted NTFS 
>> unfortunately.
>>     
>
> Modern Linux live CDs can read NTFS, some can write NTFS.
>   
The settings for the location of the profiles is in this registry key 
and its subkeys.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

That key's contents are used to tell windows where the profiles are and 
has been set differently in nt (c:/profiles) xp & 2k (c:/documents and 
settings) and vista (c:/users {I think})

In theory you could change the content to change where the profiles are 
stored.

My reservation about this is that there are probably some assumptions 
made in various bits of code about the location of the profiles. So even 
though you may change the registry correctly and move the data, some 
bits of code may not read the registry properly and follow the rules to 
find where things are and so will assume that the profile is on C:/ even 
though its been moved somewhere else. This might be especially true if 
you just move one users profile and plan to leave the others behind.

Also on a running system, as you point out, several files in a profile 
are open. Especially ntuser.dat, so moving the profile may need some 
care and possibly a cd system that can write NTFS.

It is, however, pretty easy to move a users "My Documents" folder 
somewhere else. I often shift that on to a samba network share in order 
to get roaming profiles and also to get the data backed up on a server.

*nix is so much easier

:-)

Ken

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