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At the risk of asking a duplicate question (a few searches yielded no good question/answer), and after messing this up royally myself (User Profile Service failed the logon after unplugging non-OS drive with "Users" folder) I am going to ask:

What is a least-trouble some but still effective way to move my user data onto a separate drive.

Goals:

  • OS/boot drive is used pretty much for booting and OS and Programs only
  • Data disk is for all conceivable user data (Photos, Videos, etc)
  • If I by change remove "Data" drive, have Windows still be fully operational

What I did in the linked question, was me using a hard link/junction to point C:\Users to D:\Users. It worked perfectly for me, until I removed drive D and booted Windows, causing Windows to not be able to load User Profile. And reattaching drive D, it did not fix my User Profile service issue and I did an OS reinstall to fix it.

So I am looking for a safer option, where my Data is still on another drive, but I can remove and replug drives as needed, with Windows breaking and still having a "Data" drive when I plug it back, with minimal recovery procedures (in case Windows complains about it missing)

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dennismv
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1 Answers1

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Using hard links and junctions does not physically separate your documents from the operating system. The link explains in more details, but a hard link can only point to another file or directory on the same disk. A junction can be created from another local drive to point your c:\users folder, but your documents still physically reside on the C drive.

What you're asking is to physically your documents folder to the D: drive, by changing the location of documents.

In Windows XP, it is as simple as right clicking on My Documents and select the new location in the Target field. In my example, I changed My Documents folder to e:\mydocs

Change My Documents Folder XP

For Windows 7, it is similar but the wording has changed a little:

Windows 7 My Documents

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