changing 'Documents & Settings' to default to D drive instead of C

The only advantage is redirecting the My Documents folder that is inside you account folder.

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\My Documents

The My Documents folder in my account is empty. Windows and every program that gets installed puts anything that would normally go to the above folder by default, into F:\Documents where it's safe if Windows decides to blow it's bowels.

 

One possible reason to put Documents and Settings on another partition:

If you use a program like FDISR, and want to have the same program installed in more than one snapshot and have it retain program settings from snapshot to snapshot. Of course, this could also defeat the safety factor of FDISR because negative changes, corruptions, etc would be retained across snapshots.

I personally use a frozen snapshot and look for ways to have a handful of specific programs save configurations over to another partition if I am confident that they are safe and aren't likely to corrupt anything rather than retaining the whole thing. Some examples are Opera profiles, Firefox profiles, and FlashFXP sites. I also move the "My Documents" part of Documents and Settings over to a second partition as well.

As for how to move it all if you really want to, there is a registry tweak that will take care of it for you [urlhttp://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=609389&postcount=8[/url]. As ErikAlbert stated, nlite can do it for you, but really all it is doing is making that registry tweak for you. You can also do it with NTFS redirects (which can essentially move anything and everything off your primary if you wanted to with that), but I tend to get chastised any time I go into details about that.

 

actually.. what i want to know is can i just move the my documents and my favourites part of documents and settings into another partition and leave the remaining documents and settings in the default C Drive?

will anything be lost if i were to reformat my C Drive?

 

To move your documents, right click on My Documents (either on your desktop, or in your start menu) and select Properties. Tell it where you want to move it to. I believe it will even offer to copy or move the contents for you.

As for Favorites... I'm not sure. I don't use IE, so all my bookmarks are in a different location.

Carl

 

If you use Firefox and Thunderbird, you can move their folder "profiles" to your data partition. How to do this is described on one of Mozilla's websites.
After that all your bookmarks, emails, email-address-books, ... are stored on your data partition.
I don't know if this is possible for all browsers, like MSIE and Opera or all email-programs.

 

See here for moving IE's favorites folder.

 

what i want to know is what's important in documents and settings? if i transfer my documents and my favourites over to my data partition, is it enough?

do i still have to transfer other files and folders such as application data, local settings, ntuser and usb001 too? i've no idea what these folders and files are used for. if there are deleted, will all my settings be deleted do?

 

No, you don't have to touch these folders.
I separated my data since March 2006. I'm still on-line.

 

It sounds like you might be confusing My Documents with Documents and Settings.

The Documents and Settings folder contains a folder for each account in Windows. Inside each account folder (Administrator, Darrin, Sarah, Kids, etc.) is a separate My Documents folder. By default, Windows tells programs to save your documents in the My Documents folder of your account folder. If you move only the My Documents folder from your account folder to drive D then you can reimage or reinstall Windows to drive C and everything that's in your My Documents folder will stay there.

However, if you move the whole Documents and Settings folder to drive D and reimage or reinstall Windows to drive C then you will be leaving behind a bunch of unnecessary junk in that folder. For example, Nero Burning Rom, when installed, creates a bunch of folders and files in your account folder. If your Documents and Settings is on drive D then those folders get written to drive D. If you then go back to an image before installing Nero, or reinstall Windows, you've still got all those folders and files (from Nero) on drive D.

If you had left Documents and Settings on drive C (and only moved the My Documents folder from your account folder to drive D), then reimaged to a pre-Nero state, then those Nero-created folders and files are gone.

Why would you delete them if they contain settings? The files and folders in Documents and Settings and your account folder are used for important things that pertain to the OS and installed apps. Deleting them can make some programs or parts of Windows not work or make you have to reconfigure things. When I turned Jetico 1.0 into a service, the config file was no longer contained in my account folder but got moved to the NetworkUser folder. Running eMule as an unpriveledged user creates a new eMuleUser account folder that has limited priveledges. I would rather these other folders remain on drive C and therefore consistent with the current state of the OS and installed apps. Documents, pictures, mp3s, and videos (which by default reside in My Documents) DO NOT need to stay consistent with the OS and therefore it's a good idea to at least put these on separate partition if you only have 1 hard drive.

 

spider_darth,
Another reason to move your data to another parition is this :

Suppose something terrible happens on your system partition, so bad that you have to restore an image, because you can't get to Windows anymore.

If your data isn't moved and still on your system partition [C:], you will lose all the changes in your data files of today and maybe more if you don't backup every day, because you have to restore an image of yesterday or even older.

If your data is moved to your data partition [D:], you won't lose anything, because all changes in your data files of today are stored on your data partition [D:]

The best thing is to move your data not only to another partition, but also to another physical harddisk, which is safer if your harddisk of your system partition crashes.

You can also choose which partition needs a backup, which is also an advantage. Data partition needs more backup than system partition.

 

in fact, i've understood the importance of separating my data files from my system files.

my dilemma now remains at whether i should shift the whole 'Documents and Settings' over to another partition or just shift the 'My Documents' of each user account onto the separate partition.

 

the reason why i'm thinking of deleting them is because my C Drive (20GB) is running out of space. There's only about 1 GB of free space left. And, the 'documents and settings' folder takes up to 3GB of space.

However, I'm really puzzled by what is actually in my C Drive. Cuz my program files only has 5GB, so where did the remaining 10GB or so went? There's a lot of files in my C Drive which i have no idea whether it's safe to delete.

And, can someone tell me which is the file which contains the OS? Or, is the OS never seen?

 

Having just spent some time modifying (with nLite) and testing a Windows install with the Documents and Settings folder on another partition, I found that although this didnt seem to cause much in the way of problems with software, it certainly did cause problems when installing some hardware.
In the end, I concluded that the aggravation and instability caused just wasnt worth the benefits. This was on a clean snapshot in FDR, and no other reason could I find for the problems.

 

What has new hardware to do with "Documents and Settings" ? That doesn't sound very logical.
OK it doesn't matter. For now, I keep my separation as it is and I didn't move any Windows folder from [C:] to [D:], not even "My Documents", just a Firefox and Thunderbird folder.

 

Not being a comp expert as others here, I have no idea why moving the Folder affected the hardware.........but undoubtedly it did. No other explanation.
I just reported the results. I do not have the answers.

 

and not providing enough info to sort out what was really the issue I guess we'll let you keep thinking that


(hardware is hardware, its either working or it isnt, if its acting funny its either degraded or its a software issue BIOS-Firnware\kernel\driver\application, but if you change the software and it gets better (location of a file) its not hardware)

 

Never said it was. READ the post!

 

One solution is described in this thread especially in posts #23, 25 and 37..

 

from the above you blame the relocation of a directory for a hardware issue

here you state keeping the directory in the default location does not induce the issue

ergo there is no hardware issue, and never was a hardware issue
there is a software recognition of hardware issue

you also fail to describe exactly what was the issue and what hardware was affected, or how, simply implying "instability". Much less the OS or steps you took that caused the issue so that the membership might spot what went astray.

You have either rushed to judgment, of are having difficulties with the finer definitions of what is hardware and what is software. In either event your pronouncement is at best inaccurate and at worse false.

Troubleshooting is all about culling the suspects down to the real issue starting with the most probable or easiest to test, rushing to judgment without exhausting the potential culprits and assigning blame where it has in fact not been proven is a disservice to all that follow. That there was an issue I don't doubt, but throwing up your hands and inaccurately assigning blame (or in this case consequences) doesnt help you or anyone else.

if this seems a little nitpicky consider that far more people read threads then post in them, many employing them as an educational tool, this process of separation of OS from data space is an increasingly attractive one for the same reasons you likely tried it (security compartmentalization\backup\recovery\ect) But that even the impression that hardware can be damaged is a chilling effect.

 

@IC. Thankyou for your input.

Maybe it would have been more helpful if I had added the caveat that this was my experience on "My System" I certainly did not mean to mislead anyone else who might be reading this thread. I do realise that it was a software recognition problem, and I never said it was a Hardware problem. Just that the hardware was "affected" but that doesnt make it any less real in terms of MY system.

@tlu

Thanks for the great link. Will certainly take some time to digest this.

 

thats the thing about language, especially when its divorced from any other nonverbal cues, what you mean and think may not translate into a definitive context, it can slip into a grey area where it can get interpreted into a totally unexpected direction. Play around on forums enough and you start to change how you write
(with lots of ass covering caveats too )

While I was tracking what you where getting at, spelling it out can be an educational exercise that hopefully benefits everyone.

a good overview of the many levels where things can go wrong
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(computer_science)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_driver
http://i11.tinypic.com/4dhbcjc.png

deductively its likely the issue is in the top level, and having played with nLite and XPlite, its not that hard to bust an OS without an intimate knowledge of various dependencies. A few tools that might be helpful.

http://wiki.djlizard.net/Dial-a-fix
http://www.dependencywalker.com/

the real trick it to spot exactly which step is breaking the install