Move User Profile to 2nd Drive in Win 7

Well, this was an interesting foray into Windows 7. I just purchased a new laptop and didn’t like the way the hard drive was partitioned. Why partition an NTFS drive at all? The manufacturer had created an 80 GB primary partition with a 420 GB extended partition. Of course the OS and user profiles are stored on the relatively small primary partition. This I did not like. I put a lot of music on my laptop, along with my development projects and multimedia files. 80 GB just won’t cut it. I could have purchased 3rd party software to repartition the drives (Win 7’s built in tool won’t do the job here) but I didn’t want to do that. The solution? Move the files to the d: drive and create a symbolic (hard) link to new location.

Starting with Vista, Windows finally has a symbolic link tool, similar to its UNIX / LINUX counterparts. To move profiles, however, you must follow a strict procedure. It isn’t hard to do, but you have to do it correctly or it won’t work. Here’s an outline of the process:

1. Login with a 2nd admin profile
2. Use Robocopy to copy the user profile(s) to the new location
3. Rename the original folder
4. Create a hard link to the new location, using the original folder name
5. Check things out and if OK, delete the original files

FIRST – CREATE A RESTORE POINT. You knew that already didn’t you?

Login as a second user with admin writes

Create a new user if required, restart in safe mode and login. Launch a command window (to launch with admin privileges, type cmd into the run or search bars and hit ctrl+shift+enter). You’ll need to be in safe mode or all of the files may not copy.

User Robocopy – not XCopy

It is very important to use Robocopy and not XCopy. The first time I tried this, I used XCopy and no joy.  The command will look like this (substitute your profile name for [profile name]):

robocopy /mir /xj C:\Users\[profile name] D:\Users\[profile name].

You should be able to copy the users folder, and then all subsequent user profiles will be created on the new drive. I just moved my primary user profile.  /mir tells robocopy to mirror the directories, this will copy all files and permissions. /xj is very important, this tells robocopy not to follow junction points. If you forget this, you will have a lot of trouble. Make sure no files failed to copy (FAILED column = 0).

Next you must rename the original folder. You can’t create a symlink to a folder name that exists. Rename your old profile to myprofile_old or something like that. Now use mklink to create a hard link to the new location. The command will look like this:

mklink /J c:\users\[profile name] d:\users\[profile name]

This will create an NTFS junction to the new folder. Windows will treat it as if it were on the main drive partition and you can access it via c:\users\[profile name]. The /J switch creates a hard link so you don’t have to muck about in the registry. Now restart and login as the user. Everything *should* be hunk-dory. If you get the message that Windows is creating a temp profile, something went awry. Check the registry using the info at the following link: Fixing profile issues. If that doesn’t work, you always have that restore point This worked great for me and now all of my profile info and files are on the large partition and I am happy again.

Cheers!

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