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Win10 - First login creates new profile

Printed From: ForensiT
Category: ForensiT Support
Forum Name: Move Computer
Forum Description: User Profile Transfer Wizard questions, suggestions, comments and bug reports
URL: https://forum.ForensiT.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=2118
Printed Date: 27 Mar 2026 at 12:39am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.03 - http://www.webwizforums.com


Topic: Win10 - First login creates new profile
Posted By: acw
Subject: Win10 - First login creates new profile
Date Posted: 03 Dec 2021 at 9:15pm
Hello! First off, my gratitude for making TransWiz available for free, it's a fantastic product that saves an incredible amount of time. I've used it successfully on several system migrations, but ran into an issue on a newer on-premises domain we manage for a customer.

The existing AD user profile from the source machine (Windows 10 Pro 21H1) copied without errors using a Domain Admin account. When attempting to restore it to a newly imaged machine (Windows 10 21H2), no errors were reported either, but when the user signed in for the first time, it created a new profile ("tsmith.domain.com" instead of the regular "tsmith"), which of course didn't contain any of the user's profile data. I was able to manually copy the contents of the TransWiz migrated profile into this new one without issues, but I was wondering what caused Windows to ignore the already existing profile. Do I have to manually add the user as owner of the C:\Users\tsmith folder if they haven't signed into this computer previously? There was no merge prompt, as when the restore was carried out using the same Domain Admin account, the user hadn't signed in yet. There is also no profile redirection in place on this domain.

I suspect this is of course more of a Windows issue than anything to do with TransWiz, but if anyone else ran into this before I'd love to hear how you solved it.

Thank you! Smile




Replies:
Posted By: acw
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2021 at 6:29pm
I found a reliable way to work around this issue - have the user log in once on the new (destination) PC to create the empty profile, then log them back out and run TransWiz with an Admin account (Domain or Local) and select "Merge". This will avoid creating a "tsmith.domain.com" and places all files properly into "tsmith".

I'm wondering if there's a way to have it work consistently without having the user sign in first, but this fails on all 21H1 and 21H2 systems I've tried on this domain so far and creates a new user profile each time they sign in for the first time.

I'm not sure what exactly is different on this domain that would cause this, but it does work with the extra step.



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