[SOLVED] How to transfer user profiles over to Win 10 reinstallation?

[Moonstick2]

TL;DR: Doing a full reinstall of Win10. How do I carry over all the user profiles, settings and data as seamlessly as possible?

After eight (!) years, my PC's finally showing its age in more recent games while prices have settled to something a bit more normal, so I've gone for a CPU/motherboard/GPU/PSU upgrade. I've done several rebuilds over the years, but this is my first with Win 10. My question is how to deal with the Windows 10 installation with minimum pain.

The licence manager reports my licence as a Retail version so I'm not expecting any licencing issues, even though it was originally a Windows 7 key?

Most software (Office, browsers, email, backup software, antivirus etc) I accept I'll just need to reinstall. All my Steam games are on a separate hard disk, so I'm pretty sure I only need to install Steam and point it at that.

User profiles are the one I'm not sure about. There are four accounts on the PC plus one admin account. The Users folder isn't on C: with Windows but on a separate D: drive. This was done to keep the data separate, preventing the need for a huge C: drive and meaning any major OS issue would only need me to restore a backup image/clone of C: It's worked flawlessly.

The ideal would be that the other users won't notice any difference on the new PC: desktops, taskbars, user icons, mouse speeds, everything user-based and of course data would be exactly as before. How can I achieve this? Can I just point the new Win 10 installation at the D:/Users/ folder and it'll pick up all the accounts there? Do I have to recreate each account's name & password and then point them at D:? Is there some kind of Win 10 function or third-party software I can use? Ideally I want to avoid having to use Microsoft online accounts if at all possible.

 

[geofelt]

What is the make/model of the old and new motherboards?
A clean install is the stock recommendation.

After 8 years, you will never remember all of the settings and changes made over time. I can understand the pain of a clean install.

But, if the motherboards are sufficiently similar(intel to intel) then it is likely that your current Windows C drive will boot, requiring only to install motherboard drivers.

Protect yourself first.
Clone your C drive and remove your original c drive from the machine as a backup.

I have used this procedure several times with good success.

 

[Moonstick2]

They're both Asus motherboards, H97 chipset to B660 chipset. The CPU is going from i5 Haswell to i5 Alder Lake and the GPU from R9 290 to 6700 XT.

Although I've an idea that I could just connect the C: OS drive up to the new rig and it might sort itself out, with that many changes it seems too likely that it will either get buggy and crash regularly or it won't perform as well as it could. Maybe some people have managed to do that with Win 10 though without any problems ever?

C: drive is already regularly cloned, as mentioned. Keeping the current C: as a backup I'm not keen on. It's a new-ish SSD, and to get a comparable one means spending another £25 - £35 plus delivery on top of everything else so far.

It's not really the Windows 10 settings on the C: drive I'm worried about keeping but all the user settings on the D: drive. How do I get the new Windows 10 installation to know about them?

 

[geofelt]

Your chances via cloning are good.
On graphics, just plan on updating the gpu drivers.

 

[Grobe]

TL;DR: Doing a full reinstall of Win10. How do I carry over all the user profiles, settings and data as seamlessly as possible?

Let say you've hundred applications installed. Here is the issue: If you restore all data, chances are some or many of those apps will remove old user data or just replace with a default/blank profile. Assume each app installer handle this issue different from each other. Only way of restore complete data set of user profile is to add the data files manually AFTER all the programs are re-installed.
However - some programs may have issues reading user data if the data set was created in an older version of the program. Ideally this shouldn't be an issue, but you should assume apps can contains bugs like this.

 

[Moonstick2]

I'm not talking about anything relating to the applications. Like I said, I accept I'll need to reinstall most of this.

I'm talking about the information relating to local Windows user accounts, four of which are standard and one of which is admin. The stuff which, as far as I know, all resides within the /Users/ folder, which I've placed on a separate drive to Windows.. Most of the stuff is the /Documents/, /Photos/ and /Downloads/ folders for each account, for example, but /Desktop/ is quite a specific one. Also things like wallpapers for example: the wallpaper image might be on the C: drive, but where is the setting that points to it? In the Registry on the C: drive, or somewhere within the user's D: folder?

Most people customise their local user account in a few ways: they set the password, the user picture, the desktop wallpaper, the taskbar pins. I'm trying to find out if there's a way to easily carry these kinds of settings across to a new Win 10 install rather than having to recreate and replicate every local user account by hand.

 

[USAFRet]

You can sync some/most of that into an MS account.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...3-279a-329926955708#WindowsVersion=Windows_10

Side note: Relocating the entire /Users/ folder to a different drive is not recommended.
That has been known to break, even during a semi annual Windows update.

 

[kerberos_20]

I'm not talking about anything relating to the applications. Like I said, I accept I'll need to reinstall most of this.

I'm talking about the information relating to local Windows user accounts, four of which are standard and one of which is admin. The stuff which, as far as I know, all resides within the /Users/ folder, which I've placed on a separate drive to Windows.. Most of the stuff is the /Documents/, /Photos/ and /Downloads/ folders for each account, for example, but /Desktop/ is quite a specific one. Also things like wallpapers for example: the wallpaper image might be on the C: drive, but where is the setting that points to it? In the Registry on the C: drive, or somewhere within the user's D: folder?

Most people customise their local user account in a few ways: they set the password, the user picture, the desktop wallpaper, the taskbar pins. I'm trying to find out if there's a way to easily carry these kinds of settings across to a new Win 10 install rather than having to recreate and replicate every local user account by hand.

windows settings can be synchronised...i never did that across multiple accounts...so no clue about that, but as long one drive syncing and settings are syncing, then on fresh install, windows settings and things like wallpaper will get restored

 

[Moonstick2]

Your chances via cloning are good.
On graphics, just plan on updating the gpu drivers.

I'm not sure what you mean by cloning. The C: drive now is going to be the C: drive after the rebuild. Do you just mean 'plug the old C: drive into the new motherboard and let Win 10 work it out?'

It's certainly tempting, and this being 2022 I'd like to think it would work. But I need better chances than 'good' because other people use it and if it starts getting glitchy and crashy I'm the one who'll have to sort it out and it'll be a pain to end up having to do the whole Windows fresh install anyway.

But maybe people have good experiences of letting Win 10 sort itself out and all the clean-install-on-rebuild is a hangover from the older Windows versions?

 

[USAFRet]

I'm not sure what you mean by cloning. The C: drive now is going to be the C: drive after the rebuild. Do you just mean 'plug the old C: drive into the new motherboard and let Win 10 work it out?'

It's certainly tempting, and this being 2022 I'd like to think it would work. But I need better chances than 'good' because other people use it and if it starts getting glitchy and crashy I'm the one who'll have to sort it out and it'll be a pain to end up having to do the whole Windows fresh install anyway.

But maybe people have good experiences of letting Win 10 sort itself out and all the clean-install-on-rebuild is a hangover from the older Windows versions?

Putting a drive+OS (or a clone) into a whole new system has 3 possible outcomes:

1. It works just fine. Windows figures itself out
2. It fails completely
3. It "works", but you're chasing issues for weeks/months.

I've personally seen all 3.

Win 10 is better than previous, but by no means guaranteed.

 

[Moonstick2]

You can sync some/most of that into an MS account.

Like I said, I'm avoiding having to set up and link MS accounts for each profile. It looks like I'll have to at least link the product key and admin to mine though.

Side note: Relocating the entire /Users/ folder to a different drive is not recommended.
That has been known to break, even during a semi annual Windows update.

I set it up that way about eighteen months ago when I had to do a Win reinstallation after an SSD failure, for reasons too boring to explain here. Never had any issues, but I guess if I ever do I'll have to keep it on the same drive. 2022 and Microsoft still assumes C:

I've found some of my notes from the previous installation, so I think I'll go the whole hog, do a reinstall and resign myself to probably having to rebuild the user profiles by hand.

 

[USAFRet]

Right.
It doesn't always break, but it has been known to break in that sort of config.

I would have suggested the 'Easy transfer Wizard' from MS, but apparently that has been discontinued.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...ndows-10-ff30fba8-9b3e-58f8-5cf2-dfabae35fa01

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Right.
It doesn't always break, but it has been known to break in that sort of config.

I would have suggested the 'Easy transfer Wizard' from MS, but apparently that has been discontinued.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...ndows-10-ff30fba8-9b3e-58f8-5cf2-dfabae35fa01

If one has access to a Windows 7 machine the entire Easy Transfer Wizard folder can be copied to a thumb drive and then to the source and destination machines from there. The Easy Transfer Wizard from Windows 7 runs just fine in Windows 10 & 11.

 

[Moonstick2]

As an update, part of my thinking was based on the current C: being a newish 256 GB SSD drive when I've realised it's actually an older 128 GB - one advantage of having an OS-only drive is that you barely need to think about the space on it. The D: drive is ~500 GB SSD. Games are on a 1 TB M.2, and a 256 GB SSD is used for internal backups. (Yes I backup externally too.)

(For those wondering why this arrangement, two years ago a known-brand C: 256 GB SSD with OS + data went completely dead, which turned out to be common with this drive. I got a new 500 GB SSD drive, had an old 128 GB drive kicking about and decided to put Windows on the 128 GB as C: and /Users/ on the 500 GB as D: thinking that: if there was another failure I'd only have to restore the OS or the data but not both; C: backup images are smaller; if I needed more space for user data it would just mean buying a bigger drive, copying the data over and making it D: without needing to trouble Windows.)

I feel less likely to keep the OS on this drive for the next 5-8 years which means it's better doing it all properly now. So this drive can be pulled out and the 500 GB drive turned into C: with a clean install of OS and the /Users/ there where Windows prefers it. I'll rebuild the profiles by hand as there doesn't seem to be anything out there Microsoft or 3rd party which is guaranteed to migrate profiles to Win 10 without glitches. If I need more data space in the next few years I can get a 1 TB SSD and clone C: across or even a 2 TB SSD for games and turn the current 1 TB into C:

Makes sense?

 

[USAFRet]

Yes, makes sense.

A 500GB, with Windows and /Users/ on makes MUCH more sense than a 128GB and /Users/ elsewhere.

 

[Moonstick2]

A 500GB, with Windows and /Users/ on makes MUCH more sense than a 128GB and /Users/ elsewhere.

Although it wouldn't with any sensible OS