Move from domain to workgroup, lost data

[blockage 0]

First time on the board...hope anyone can help a bit.

 

I just finished helping (well, screwing) a friend who recently purchased his laptop from his former employer. At work he was on the work domain, and I told him that he didn't need to use that profile anymore, so just configure the computer to not use the work domain anymore (switch it to be in a workgroup instead of the domain.)

 

Well, after doing that, he obviously couldn't login to the domain user profile he had. Fortunately we knew his local admin account and got that up (in the workgroup.) Now it looks as if all of his settings (Outlook .pst, my docs) associated with the domain profile are gone! Did that happen when I switched him to the workgroup from the domain, or did something else happen that I'm clueless about? Can moving from a domain to a wkgrp delete data in the domain profile???

 

TIA

[GTwannabe 0]

You need to copy his domain account settings to the local account he wishes to use. Log onto the computer with the Administrator account. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\His_Domain_Account and copy all files/folders to C:\Documents and Settings\His_Local_Account

 

Or you can just move the My Documents folder from the domain profile to the C: drive and point to it in his local account.

[blockage 0]

thx for the reply.

 

When we changed the domain account from a domain to a workgroup and then reset the machine, we were not able to log using the domain account any longer. We were not on the domain when we did the change to a wrkgrp.

 

When we go to the local account and login, we can browse to the \docs and settings\domain acct, but it no longer has any info in it!!! That's the thing that I'm amazed by... For domain secuirty reasons, will XP delete the info in a domain account when you change that account to a workgroup?

 

For kicks, we did a search on .pst to find his Outlook files, but the only one we found was for the local account, not the domain profile. I still don't understand how they disappeared! Argh!