• Moving desktop/document folders

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    #392143

    Hi all,
    How can I move my Desktop and ‘documents and settings’ folder to another drive w/o messing up Windows? These folders point to a small partition on my primary (boot) drive and I’d like them to be on my 2nd larger drive. Part of the reason I want to do this is that I need more room for the temp folder as a new CD burner program I bought complains that it’s too small to contain the compressed image it creates before writing to the CD.

    In my environment variables it shows TEMP/TMP as something like %USERPROFILE%Local SettingsTemp” which is actually a small partition D: off of my 1st drive. If I changedthe value of these variables to point to my larger 2nd drive, is this enough?

    In the environment variable list there are two sections, a) user variables for and system variables. Can I change both TEMP and TMP from both of these lists w/o killing Windows? crossfingers

    I do own PartitionMagic but not sure if it’ll let me move these ‘system’ folders (it doesn’t let me move everything, just *almost* everything).

    Thnx, Deb

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    • #702910

      Please note I have never used Partition Magic on my own machine, but:

      • Resetting BOTH environment variables does work – in the majority of cases. There are occasional installation programs that will have hard-coded references that ignore the registry. You may wish to drag and drop the existing folders – pressing SHIFT as you do so – to the new destination also.
      • Desktop can also be moved using drag and drop on the existing folder – pressing SHIFT as you do so. This will – unsurprisingly – kibosh the display for a while before Windows reorients itself; but I have never had any lasting damage from this.
      • There are certain individual parts of Documents and Settings which you cannot move: the index.dat for Temporary Internet Files and the ntuser.dat file being principal examples. The bulk of it you can move. The simplest thing is to start using drag and drop on the existing folder – pressing SHIFT as you do so. Then follow up moving the rest – working through the various subfolders to locate where the “cannot move” messages originate.[/list]HTH
    • #703035

      Norton Ghost is a program that I have that will do what you need (I think). It has a feature called “Clone” that allows you to copy one drive onto another (larger) drive. You set the larger drive as Slave, do the clone and then change the jumper settings on the drive so the bigger one is Master and the small one as slave. After you reboot you can reformat the smaller drive to give you the extra space.
      HTH

      • #703262

        You can move as much or as little of your profile to another partition. I have “My Documents” on “E” along with my Outlook pst file. The easiest way to move things that are always running in your profile is to log in as “Administrator” and navigate to the folder you want to move and highlight it then click on “move to” and put it where you like. Depending on what you moved, when you next log in to your profile you might have to help Windows find things the first time if it says it cannot find something.

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