Posts Tagged ‘ntuser.dat’

How to copy locked files in a Windows profile folder (ntuser.dat etc.)

Monday, September 6th, 2010

Not really a programming issue, but if you need to copy files from a Windows profile folder to another location (eg. you want to copy a profile to a different one, make it roaming/local etc) then you may find that Windows has locked the file and won’t let you do it.  If you want to get around this, reboot the PC (logging off probably won’t work) and make sure that you log straight in as a different user who has sufficient rights to access the profile folders for both of the other 2 (eg. the local machine Administrator account).  Windows should let you do the copying then.