Converting a Local Windows Account into an Active Directory Account

Converting a Local Windows Account into an Active Directory Account

Introduction

If you're anything like me, you might have a handful of PCs or VMs with local accounts on them from an era prior to you having an Active Directory domain.  Until now, it seemed to me that there was no reasonable way to get the contents of these local accounts transferred onto a domain-based account.

Sure, you could manually copy files over but this still likely wouldn't get everything.  It would also get fairly tedious moving application data over, as well.  That being said, it's something I haven't wanted to touch with a ten foot pole... until now.

When domain-joining my girlfriend's laptop to give her some of the benefits of my homelab, such as having access to a share drive, I stumbled upon a tool by ForensiT called User Profile Wizard.

This free piece of software is able to migrate your local Windows account into one of your existing domain accounts and in today's post, I'll be covering how to install it and perform the migration process.

Installation

To begin, you will need to download the latest version of User Profile Wizard Personal Edition from this site.

Upon loading up the installer, you will be prompted to read the EULA and accept the terms of conditions before being able to install the software.

After installing the software and then launching it, you will be shown the following screen, prompting you to begin the migration process.

On this step, all users currently residing on the machine will be displayed. As you can see, I currently only have one local account named tcude. My goal is to tie this account to my AD account that is also named tcude so I will select it and then click "Next".

Here we will specify the domain we're wanting to migrate the account to.  As previously mentioned, I'm wanting to tie this account to my AD account that also shares the name tcude, so I've specified it in the second text field.

After clicking "Next", the migration process will begin and the output should look similar to what is displayed in the image above.

Upon completion, the software will automatically log you out of your current session, for you to then re-log in as your new domain migrated account. The credentials will be exactly the same as they usually are when logging in with your AD account.

Conclusion

Converting your local Windows account into an AD account is as simple as that! Hopefully, if you were in a situation similar to me, you find this post helpful. I found the software to be very easy to use and am enjoying getting to prune up any old local accounts and rely solely on AD authentication.