The relocated profile went temporary on the target and stayed that way. The
cause was not the profile: the image ships with ProfilesDirectory set to
D:\Users but with no drive letter for the data disk. generalize strips
MountedDevices, and the specialize pass that re-asserts the letter runs only in
the build VM, never on the target -- so the zvol boots letterless, the first
autologon cannot find D:\Users\sagar (event 1511), and Windows falls back to a
temporary profile, renames the real ProfileList key to .bak, and the fault
sticks on every later logon.
Confirmed by reading the shipped image offline: ProfileList has the SID at
D:\Users\TEMP with a .bak sibling at D:\Users\sagar, MountedDevices carries no
\DosDevices\D:, and the sagar hive on the zvol is intact -- so nothing was
wrong but the letter.
An onstart SYSTEM task now runs the existing (idempotent) data-disk init, whose
diskpart assign writes MountedDevices and so makes D: persistent for every
later boot. Only the first boot is exposed to the race; if it left a .bak, a
small PowerShell heal puts the key back, drops the temp profile, and reboots
once -- after which D: is persistent and the real profile loads. Same onstart /
SYSTEM mechanism the static address already uses.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0117qMyjpuXsjpVAcpJbFD8g
d94c576df2