I had an interesting USMT error that I haven’t run into before today with a client. Simply put, USMT can get hung up over orphaned profiles in the system. This might cause your USMT scanstate, whether in SCCM or MDT, to get stuck on the “Initializing” or “starting the migration process” step. This is caused when your profiles (orphaned or not) don’t match the actual profiles in your system folder. See below:
The profiles under Documents and Settings:
The profiles listed in the registry (that should match, but don’t), and the corresponding user name found in the key:
This will simply cause USMT to hang until it fails. A more detailed description of the logs and issue can be found on this Microsoft blog article.
The easy (and manual) fix: delete the profiles in the registry that don’t have a corresponding user profile folder.
The more elegant (and automated) fix: script an environment variable in MDT/SCCM to identify the profiles, and then remove them. More information on this solution is available on this blog post from The Deployment Guys.