Troubleshooting the User State Migration Tool 4.0

I gave a presentation today at the TechEd New Zealand conference on “Customizing the User State Migration Tool 4.0” – something I’ve talked with customers about back from my consulting days (way back when, probably with USMT 2.6 at that point – remember that one and its INF-style configuration files?), but haven’t presented in public for a very long time. Needless to say, it was somewhat nerve-wracking. For those in attendance, I hope it was worth your time. (I thought it was only OK. I’ll do better the next time.)

The next few blog postings will likely be related to USMT 4.0 – it’s always good to write about things that are freshly in your mind.

First off, I wanted to take the opportunity to pass along some of the troubleshooting items that I mentioned in the slide deck, consolidating various issues that you might run into while using USMT 4.0. Here they are:

USMT 4.0 isn’t migrating Office 2010 settings

Make sure you install the USMT 4.0 update that adds Office 2010 support. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/mniehaus/archive/2011/02/02/usmt-4-0-support-for-office-2010.aspx for more information.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2023591

USMT fails with some half-hour time zones

Install the USMT update for Office 2010 (see above), as it fixes this too.

Bad user profiles (usually a ProfileList registry entry that points to a non-existent folder) can cause state capture issues (delays, failures)

Clean them up or tell USMT to ignore them with MIG_IGNORE_PROFILE_MISSING=1
See http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2010/03/28/usmt-failures-due-to-bad-profile-list-entries.aspx for a script that can help identify these and clean them up so that they don’t cause any issues.
See http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2011/04/14/usmt-pauses-at-quot-starting-the-migration-process-quot-for-many-minutes-then-works.aspx for more details about the problem.
Setting MIG_IGNORE_PROFILE_MISSING is rather challenging in ConfigMgr (you can’t set it as a process environment variable because it goes away before the “Capture User State” step runs, so you need to set it as a system variable, reboot, and then capture state). See Michael Murgolo’s blog posting at http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2011/08/03/setting-environment-variables-in-a-task-sequence.aspx for details on how to do this. (You could do a shorter way with MDT Lite Touch by modifying ZTIUserState.wsf to set the variable.)

OS settings don’t migrate with ConfigMgr

This happens because USMT can only find the “DLManifests” folder necessary to do OS setting migration in the working directory, and ConfigMgr doesn’t set the working directory to the location that contains this. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2018593 for more information.
MDT 2010 Update 1 includes a workaround for this problem, although the USMT 4.0 fix for Office 2010 (see above) breaks the workaround, requiring a script change (also described in the blog above).

USMT migrates user data from removable drives even with /localonly

It migrates USB disks even with /localonly, use an unconditional exclude to exclude undesired USB disks.
See Michael Murgolo’s blog posting at http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2009/04/29/excluding-usb-firewire-and-other-drives-from-usmt-capture.aspx for a scripted approach of doing this (taking into account that the drive letters can be different on each system, so you might need a different exclude list for each PC).