Vista Banter - View Single Post - How to move "Program Files" to another drive/partition

**Mick Murphy**

WHY?
--
Mick Murphy - Qld - Australia

"reinux" wrote:

Hey people, I figured out a good way to do this.

Start the computer with the Vista installer CD and run the system
recovery tool -- specifically, the command prompt. Windows will have
some files in the Users and Program Files folders locked, so it has to
be done from another OS instance.

First we xcopy the Users and Program Files folders to the destination
drive; then we rename (or remove) the original folders and replace them
with 'junctions' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point)
pointing to the copied folders. For all intents and purposes, Vista
becomes oblivious to the fact that anything had moved. You don't have to
tinker with the registry.

I think this trick would probably work for Windows XP as well.

I've made a .bat script that does this; you can either use this or
punch everything in in the command prompt yourself. %1 is assumed to be
the source drive and %2 is assumed to be the destination drive. Be sure
to specify these parameters before you run the script.

Code:
--------------------

%2
cd \
mkdir "Program Files"
cd "Program Files"
%1
xcopy "%1\Program Files" %2 /s /h
rename "Program Files" "Program Files_"
mklink /j "Program Files" "%2\Program Files"

%2
cd \
mkdir "Users"
cd "Users"
%1
xcopy "%1\Users" %2 /s /h
rename "Users" "Users_"
mklink /j "Users" "%2\Users"

--------------------

Sample usage would be as follows:

Code:
--------------------
movefolders.bat c: b:
--------------------

Hope this helps,

Rei

--
reinux
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