Granting admin rights to users after initial deployment

[Calvenn]

Hello,

As a new member, I have to commend the group of professionals on this board for their ongoing assistance and contributions with the various questions and problems experienced by many.

You have to forgive me if my question sounds like a "low level" one. Unfortunately, I have strayed away from practicing and studying the Microsoft OS as much as I should. Instead, I have of late directed my focus primarily on the Cisco and Linux/Unix field of study, recently completing the CCNA, which is truly where my heart lies (Network technician, LAN,WAN engineering, etc)

Having just commenced a new position as a Desktop support technician for a major company in my area, and working primarily with Win2k on the desktop side, I have stumbled upon some issues. Actually, this particular problem existed before my arrival.

The problem: It seems that for some odd reason, after imaging and deploying PC's for users in one of our departments, we have to grant these users admin priviledges after this initial setup in order for them to successfully login to the system. Basically, we grant them admin rights, allow them to login with their user info and password. Once this process is complete, we then remove admin priviledges.

As you can see, this is not an efficient way of conducting things in any environment. We do know that this problem only exists with certain images however. Unfortunately, I don't have the exact error message with me at this time, but I recall something like "unable to copy to user profile". Has anyone encountered anything similar?

Again, forgive me if I'm not providing enough information. I would like to begin this dialogue in order to find a solution eventually.

Please contribute your thoughts and ideas on this subject.

Thank you.


MCP NT 4.0, CCNA

 

[kmcferrin]

Check the file permissions on the C:\Documents and Settings folder. It's possible that someone erroneously restricted access to that folder, which is where user profiles are created.

Also, check the permissions on the C:\Documents and Settings\Default User folder. This is a hidden folder, so you may have to change your View properties to see it. This is where the system pulls information about how to build new user profiles. If the permissions are incorrect then the new profile may not be able to be created.

The correct permissions for both should be:
Administrators and System groups - Full permissions

Everyone, Power Users, and Users groups - Read & Execute, List Folder Contents, and Read

 

[Calvenn]

Thanks for the quick feedback! From what I gather from your response, the bottom line is that the image might be corrupt and more than likely needs to be built from scratch? I figured this would be highly likely (Although I was hoping for another way to circumvent the problem) knowing that the other images don't suffer this particular anomaly. It's interesting to see that assigning, then later removing admin rights seems to be the only fix at the moment.

I will do further research concerning the error as well as the other images. You have provided much insight and I truly appreciate your thoughts and advice. I will certainly apply what you have suggested here and also let you know of my findings.

MCP NT Server 4.0, CCNA

 

[kmcferrin]

It may not need to be rebuilt from scratch. If you used Ghost to make the images you should be able to use Ghost Explorer to mount and modify them without rebuilding from scratch. If you are able to determine that the problem is simply a corrupt profile or incorrect profile settings this could potentially be a quick fix.

If you don't use Ghost or a tool with similar functionality, you can still apply the image to a new machine, make the corrects to fix the problem, then re-master the image using your standard process.