Wednesday, November 17, 2010

How do you change the directory of libraries in windows 7?

I formatted my new laptop and created 2 partitions on the hard drive. One for OS and the other for my files. I want to create or move the library to my D: drive instead of the C; drive.How do you change the directory of libraries in windows 7?
If you really want to move the entire C:\Users directory to a different drive, you have to do it during Windows 7 installation using an AutoUnattend.xml file. Then ALL your configuration settings (not just your Documents folder) will be created on the separate drive for all current and future users created on the machine. That way, you can easily mirror that drive and/or schedule regular backups of it. Overriding default directory locations should really be an option during the install, but Microsoft has buried the functionality so only SysAdmin types can figure it out. I might have discovered why....



I set my AutoUnattend.xml file to put the Users directory on my D: drive. Unfortunately, several of the ';junction'; symbolic links that Windows 7 installed on the C: drive (and even the D: drive) didn't follow this change, so they were all pointing to ';C:\Users';, which doesn't exist. Worse yet, I found that the ';D:\Users\All Users'; junction -- which should logically point to ';D:\Users\Public'; -- was actually a SymLink pointing to ';C:\Program Files';! This caused no end of confusion, because it filled my ';All Users'; directory with all of my installed programs, intermingled with the actual configuration directories. I had to manually remove these links and recreate them correctly (using the command-line MKLINK /J).



BTW, Windows 7 locks these junction links so even an Admin can't expand them in Windows Explorer. This is incredibly annoying -- particularly given the aforementioned errors in the link references. With junctions, you can't even view the Properties to see where they point! I deleted the ';Everyone'; security entry for every one of these links so I could figure out what they point. It wasn't until later that I discovered the command-line ';DIR /AL'; command to list all the links and their destinations. Doesn't locking the junction links entirely defeat the purpose of having them?? These links are there to fool legacy software into thinking that the expected directories are in their classic WinXP locations, but if the links are all locked down (even for Admins), I don't see how they can possibly work.
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