Change Redirected Documents Path Registry Fix
Someone with a few more years IT experience than me quite a few years ago said that they did not like Re-Directed My Documents. At the time I didn’t really get their point. It seemed like a great way, in theory of not storing data on local machines and ensuring that they are updated server side.
It is not until you do a few server migrations, especially from the SBS environment where redirected Documents /Desktop/Apps etc are I believe enabled out of the box that you begin to appreciate how much of a pain they can be. Even if you change the path of the redirected profiles within your Group Policy or re direct them back to the end users machine. It does not always seem to work as it should. You can try and do as many “gp updates /force” commands as you like but it will still have you scratching your head. At which point we may need to look to change the Registry on the end users machine
The purpose of this document is to explain how to manually point users redirected my Documents folder and subsequent folders to a specific location. This task may need to be undertaken if the redirected location has moved to another server or perhaps back to the local machine. this should be done after trying to Update your group policy no longer works
– Log in as a different user to the one you are attempting to fix the problem for such as Admin User
– Open Regedit
– Select HKEY Users
Then go to – Load Hive
We want to navigate to the user’s local profile on the machine and open ‘NTUSER.DAT’
We then need to give the key a name for this Demo I have called it Banana
Now within HKEY_USERS we select our Keyname ‘Banana’ and navigate to the following area
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Banana\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
We can now see here that we have multiple enteries for Folder redirection
if we want to change where a path points to say for example ‘Personal’ Which is the users ‘My Documents’ Folder Right click and select Modify
We are then able to enter the path that we want to point to for the redirected my documents
This can be to the new Server that you have relocated the Redirected My Documents to
It can also be back to the local machine if you wish
Now that we have made all of the amendments that we need to we are in a position where we can Save or ‘Unload the Hive ‘
Go back up the Tree and select the Hive we loaded previously. ‘Banana’
Go to File and select Unload Hive
Confirm the pop up message
You will now see that you are able to view your my documents folder and it is now pointing to the correct path