KACE Product Support

USMT 3.01 (target is Windows XP) or 4.0 (target is Windows 7 or Vista) are command line programs, so they will run fine from batch files. (Or VBscripts or PowerShell or any other scripting environment you're familiar with.) The documentation has examples of ScanState.exe and LoadState.exe commands, which you're going to customize for your environment. Someone else's scripts are not going to help with this; you have to understand and change the command line parameters for your environment.

One big challenge is the context problem. The batch file needs to run as Local System so it has Administrator-level access to all the user accounts it's trying to capture. But to store the captured profiles on a network share, the batch file will have to have access to that network share as well. (Why a network share? Well, where else are you going to store multi-gigabyte files?) This approach does not integrate with the K2000 approach to USMT.

There's another possible complication to watch out for: are you capturing and restoring local accounts or domain accounts? Or do you expect to capture local accounts and restore them as domain accounts?--That gets tricky.

One final tip: Dan Cunningham has written a graphical shell for running USMT, one that can be completely controlled from the command line and a configuration file. It has a nice progress bar so you can see that something is happening. You can find it here: http://dcunningham.net/sysadmin-tools/migration-assistant/

I wish you good luck with this. Sande

You should take a look at this document from Microsoft.

I used it to setup hard link migration in the k2 before version 3.3 came out.

You could easily modify the sample scripts to be leveraged in the k1.

[link]http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/confirmation.aspx?id=18913[/link]

Hi Sande, thanks for the reply...

One thing just to be sure: When you say "Target is Windows XP" target means the machine I will be restoring the user state(s) to, right?

The reason I asked about an existing script is I find it much easier to modify an existing script to my needs than to thrash around trying to create one of my own. At least with an existing script, I know what I'm trying to do is possible... But that's fine, I appreciate what you are saying, and especially that you took the time to say it.

When you say "The batch file needs to run as Local System" does this mean a Local System Administrator account won't work?

I will be capturing Domain accounts from WinXP systems and restoring them as Domain accounts on Win7 systems so that shouldn't be an issue.

Thank you for the link to Dan Cunningham's site, I have downloaded the utility and will be checking it out.

Again, thanks for taking the time to help me with this project,

- Hamilton

Thanks Dave I'll give that a go...

Well, as luck would have it, I saw this on another forum today...

http://webpages.csus.edu/~dung.truong/MUST/

It's another graphical shell for running USMT.

- Hamilton

(Sorry I didn't reply sooner--I didn't receive a notice of your posting.)

When I say "Target is Windows XP", I mean you're restoring the user state to a computer running Windows XP, not Vista or 7. If you're restoring to Windows 7 or Vista, you're much better off using USMT 4.0, which has fixed many bugs and omissions. (For example, USMT 4.0 captures Firefox profiles, while 3.0 does not.) But you can't use USMT 4.0 if you're restoring to Windows XP.

By this: "The batch file needs to run as Local System", I mean that when you run the Kscript, I assume you're going to let it run in the default manner, "Run As Local System". If you prefer, you could run it with a specific Administrator-level account--either will work. But in our environment, no local Administrator accounts have rights to the network shares, so we have the problem.

Domain to domain should work fine, as will local to local.

As for Dan Cunningham's utility, note that he has also published the Visual Basic source code, which is well commented and easy to read. Even I was able to modify it to change the ScanState/LoadState command line with a new configuration file option, and I'm no VB programmer!

Good luck. I look forward to seeing a summary of your results here. Sande

Hey Sande,

Thanks for getting back to me, I'll be testing this out in the next couple of weeks and will post my results here (hopefully positive).

- Hamilton