Ok then what's the point of copying your current user profile? Copy the OLD profile from the old disk to your new installation! Is pretty obvious that it isn't in use in such case. This isn't a problem. Just create a new user with a random username (say Foo), then rename it to the name you want (say Bar). Your new user will be called Bar but your profile folder will be still in the old \users\Foo folder. Then you can copy your old good profile w/o any conflict. Then use Profwiz to bind your user "Bar" to your chosen profile folder \users\Bar. Pretty simple.
The reason I want to do it is to duplicate one computer onto a second one without having to install every single thing. The more important reason is so that I can save all the settings/data/apps to a (large) file and restore them onto my present computer after I do a fresh install. Right now I image my computer using Macrium Reflect, so I can restore the entire system. Also, not everyone saves their windows.old directory. And it's not on the computer I want to duplicate, because it was a fresh installation. Maybe next time I'll do an upgrade instead of a fresh install. I came to Windows in mid-life after working with Unix (Solaris) and then Linux (Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS).
Well, if the point is to duplicate a whole system, a disk imaging SW is the fastest and most obvious solution. You seem still confused about what I'm saying Case A) You made a fresh install and you want to reimport your profile, then your windows.old is there, unless you followed the pointless move of formatting the disk. B) You want to transfer your profile from a different PC/Partition/disk. Then windows.old is not required. You are in B case, but forensit is good for both of them Then your doubts are weven more surprising, given what Forensit does in Windows is what in Linux/unix was always the norm, you know... the use of a separate separate /home partition had the precise purpose of keeping the user profile(s) regardless what you're going to do to /bin /usr and whatever. in windows that is not possible (unless you're part of a domain) because the unique SID which is chosen randomly when a new user is created, Profwiz fixes that.
Only pertain if you have a freshly installed system. You can have two or more windows installation on the same computer and you may want to have the same profile on any OS installed there (or even share the same profile between installations, w/o copying it, as is pretty common in linux world) in that case you have one computer, but you don't need a windows.old folder.
That's because I'm not a guru. Thanks for your suggestions and help. I'm looking forward to trying some other software and see how it goes. I'll report back with any success.
So getting back to the original topic - and maybe this is how I should have phrased the question in the first place. At a point in the upgrade process Windows restores the user environment from windows.old. Does anyone have an idea how to duplicate this using native Windows commands?
Windows "restores" the window.old only if you do a rollback. Instead during an installation A) You chose to fresh install: Windows is installed freshly in a new folder. On the last steps (if everything went well) the old installation is moved to windows.old. The new one is moved to the root B) You choose an in place upgrade: Windows is installed freshly in a new folder. On the last steps (if everything went well) the old installation is moved to windows.old. The new one is moved to the root, \programs files and \programdata are left in place user profiles are left in place, except any incompatible program or setting, systemwide settings are imported from old to new install, and everything is not migrated is left on \windows.old. This way rolling back is matter of few minutes or even few seconds. This is how the setup works since vista. Before vista the in place upgrade replaced the files and settings, one by one, in the actual windows folder, making impossible a rollback. If you want to roll back manually from case A, you have just to move or rename 4/5 directories. Case B is more complicate, I guess anything but impossible, but personally I've never bothered to do that.
They take upgrading from an older edition to a newer one as example (7>8), that is really not the same as upgrading from win 10 build x to build y. I myself once started with win 7 SP1, upgraded to 10240 and next to 10586 and next i joined the insider program and went thru all insiders till 14393 (all by upgrade), didn't encounter any problems till i once downgraded back to an earlier insider build.
One in a while i also do clean installs, mainly to test my creations. When i start re-installing, it many times results in a week long install frenzy