Today once again, I am going to perform what can be a tricky task of moving the windows 7 User folder to another partition. You can also move it to a completely separate drive with the same steps, there’s nothing special you need to do for that. It’s rather simple, just 3 easy commands. Sorry, no GUI for this I know of all has to be done from the command line; preferably while booting from the DVD and using SHIFT+F10 to access the command line. Here are those commands you’ll need to type in (Note: the drive letters are different when you’re booting from the DVD):
- Windows7 drive letter = Drive with windows folder, this is usually the D: drive when booting from DVD.
- Drive moving users to = D: when booting from HDD, and E: when booting from DVD.
robocopy (Windows7 drive letter):\Users (Drive moving users to):\Users /mir /xj
rmdir /S /Q (Windows7 drive letter):\Users
mklink /J (Windows7 driver letter):\Users (Drive moving users to, when booting from HDD):\Users
Example:
robocopy D:\Users E:\Users /mir /xj
rmdir /S /Q D:\Users
mklink /J D:\Users D:\Users
The last line is NOT a typo. This is because the drive will become the D: drive when I remove the DVD, and reboot the system as normal. If you mess this up, it can be hard to fix.
You can find the details on how to perform this maneuver by reading the answer to the question “Mount second drive as C:\Users in Windows 7 ” posted over at superuser.com.
There are two distinct problems with this approach however:
1. You get unwanted OS specific files and cache data, that is normally stored in each users AppData, and other folders.
2. You will notice that you cannot download files in IE (only tested 8 on windows 64-bit) after performing this process.
I’m not aware of the best way to handle either of these cases. If anyone has a suggestions, then I’d like to here it.