How do I transfer user accounts, groups and share settings?

Hey guys, I've got a question for all of you.

I'm currently using a windows xp machine as a make-shift file server. I'm in IT management for a decent sized company, so we have a lot of users, groups, and security settings. This machine handles the files for four of our locations. I realize it's not the best setup, but it's cheap, and if something goes wrong I can still walk my boss through how to fix it over the phone. With Linux, that really wouldn't be an option.

Recently something went wrong, I rebooted and it simply told me that I couldn't get to windows, that there were some missing dll's. No specifics. I looked it up on support.microsoft.com and they said the only fix was to do a repair install of XP. I followed that advice, but since then the server has been having weird software related issues that I haven't been able to find a cure for. None of them are too horrible, but if they ever become such an annoyance that I need to re-install windows completely, I'd like to be able to keep our users, groups, and security settings. Not to mention it'd be nice to have a backup just in case it goes down unexpectedly, or in order to put it on a second "server" machine that we've been looking into getting.

The second priority, and this one is quite a bit smaller, is backing up sharing and security settings for our shared folders. If I can't save that, it's fine by me, it'll take me half an hour max to redo them, but if there's a quick fix I'd appreciate the heads up on it

Awesome forum btw
-Dave

 

Thanks Pete, I've been running the transfer wizard for the last few minutes now, but I started it before I read your post, so I just let it run with mostly default settings. I'm curious to see if it backs up all of my users, or just the one I'm currently logged in as. If it only backs up my current user I'm planning on trying it the way the guide says to do it and selecting a custom list of files and settings to back up.

Hopefully this will do it, as searching the net has only brought this or a disk image up as a way of backing users and settings. The disk image would be great, but I didn't think the server would be going down so soon after we got it set up, so in wanting to wait until the bugs got smoothed out before making a backup, I left myself open for failure. Of course at this point making a disk image for the purpose of reinstallation would be somewhat silly, as it would keep both the settings I want, and the OS errors that I've been having. I should however make a disk image just in case the server crashes again.

My main problems are with shutting down and rebooting windows. It freezes every time, and since my only way of accessing the server is via remote desktop that tends to be a problem. I could set up a temporary work area in our storage complex that the server is stored in, that would allow me to work outside of the windows environment, but it would be difficult. Do you know of any windows based disk image programs I could use? I have the acronis disk director suite, but as far as I know the copy I have only works if you boot to it.

Sorry for the essay sized posts, but in PC troubleshooting I've always figured more detail was better

/e.

Well, unfortunately it looks like the Files and Settings transfer wizard simply backed up folders such as My Documents, saved display settings, file type associations, and other like settings. It also only backed up those files for my current user. That's good to know for the next time I re-install at home (I hate spending those 20 minutes getting everything exactly the way I like it to look) but it doesn't help in my current situation. Do you have any other suggestions as to how to back these things up? I've been wondering if I could find registry entries for the data I want to save, but haven't found the info yet.

 

Thanks for the help Pete I'm subscribed to the thread, so if anyone replies I'll be the first to know