How to move C:\Users to D:\Users

There is no user friendly way to move your C:\Users folder to D:\ but the user unfriendly way to do it is not too hard (it was a little hard to discover, I learned how to do this when I decided that I wanted to have C:\Winnt\Profiles dir at a different location, after I lost most of my data when my main disk failed, back when Windows NT 4.0 was the latest and greatest OS from Microsoft)

Basically, after you installed Windows (this instructions are for Windows 7 but the general approach is valid since Windows NT 4.0)  you have to:

1. Login with “WhatEverIsYourUserName” account.
2. Run the Command Prompt (cmd.exe) as an Administrator
3. 
4. Copy the C:\Users\ folder to D:\Users using Robocopy
   

   robocopy C:\Users D:\Users /E /COPYALL /R:0 /Z /XJ

   
   



5. Open regedit and modify the ProfileList entry so that it looks like this:

1. Create a new (Administrator) Windows account that you will use to test the configuration change
   
   
    



2. Restart



3. Login with the “Test” Windows account



4. Delete C:\Users



5. See that the  Start menu still works (if you made a mistake, your Start menu is now empty)



6. Delete the registry Key for your “WhatEverIsYourUserName” account (if you still want to use it). (The registry Key is the yellow folder with the S-1-5… name that contains the value ProfileImagePath that points your now obsolete C:\ folder, remember,  you have to delete the whole folder/key, not just the ProfileImagePath value):
   
   
    



7. Log out



8. Now log in with your “WhatEverIsYourUserName” account



9. If you take a look at the registry now, it will look like this (The value in ProfileImagePath now starts with “D:\” instead of “C:\”):
   
    



10. Now you can delete the test account.

And that is it, now the users accounts live in D:\Users\

Recover sa account

Today, a friend from the office locked himself out of SqlServer 2008 R2 Express, somehow he managed to remove the windows Administrator account form the list of sysadmin accounts in the SqlServer express installed in a development server.

I thought there was no way to recover from a mistake a like that, but another friend found the way and gave us a link with the solution.

Basically, we need to stop the SqlService, and restart it in "single user mode" and "minimal config mode"

sqlservr.exe -m -r -s SQLEXPRESS

And the open another command window and run this commands:

osql -E -S .\SQLEXPRESS 
exec sp_password @new='changeme', @loginame='sa' 
go 
alter login sa enable 
go 
exit 

And that was it. Remember, without the special "-m -r" options, the osql commands will fail.

NOTE: In case your SQL Server is not configured to use Mixed Mode for authentication, you may also need to make some modification to the registry settings.

Basically you need to find the registry entry for the instance:

Default instance:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSSqlserver\MSSqlServer\LoginMode

Named instance:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\Instance Name\MSSQLServer\LoginMode

And  change the value of LoginMode to 2.