User Profile - Change Default Location

After a couple of years I finally got the point of needing to reinstall my OS, thank goodness I remembered this post from when I originally tried to find a way to move my User and ProgramInfo folders... which was too much for me at the time. I vowed that one day I'd have everything on my D drive. Now I will.

Thanks again.

Brink,
This looks great. I do have a question I'd like to get your opinion on. I have installed a SSD, but my User profile is too large to fit on it. I have migrated Win 7 to the SSD after stripping documents, music, etc out of my User profile so it would be small enough. However, I kept a copy of the original profile on my HDD, and after the OS migration, I restored it to the original name.

I can now boot to the OS on the SSD, or to the original OS on the HDD. The latter is exactly the same as what I had before the SSD, except that there is now an SSD in the system. When I boot to the SSD everything is fine, except that I cannot access my documents, since the corresponding folders on the SSD are empty. I want to only use the SSD boot, but I need to be able to access the User profile on the HDD.

I have considered several methods to get the SSD system to see the User profile on the HDD, but then I saw this tutorial and wondered if I used Method 1 starting from step 7 (since the User profile I want to use is already in the location where I want it), would I have access to my old user profile from the migrated OS?

The most likely alternative that I have found is to create junctions between the “My” files folders on the SSD and on the HDD, but your method seems more straightforward.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Thanks, Shawn. However, I am not just trying to save HDD space. I have about 300GB of music, video, photos, documents, etc. in my profile. I would like to run my apps like I have been doing, with the data files where the apps expect them to be. Does the library method do this? And, even though I may not use it, would the method in the tutorial work, if I start at step 7, as I described earlier?

I am willing to take a bit of a risk, since I won't be changing the system on the HDD, and I can always boot to that and restore if things go wrong.

Well, it works in the sense that everything boots and runs, but it does not work in the sense that when I try to open an existing file in a program such as Word, it still looks for it in C:\Users\myname, rather than F:\Users\myname. (iTunes is the one program that found its files on the F: drive without any problems.)

It looks as though the only way to do what I want to do that might work is to create junctions between C:\users\myname and F:\users\myname, or perhaps just between the My Documents, My Music, etc. folders.

I will try the junction solution soon and report back.

Thanks again for your help.

I created the junction between C:\Users\myname and F:\Users\myname, and everything is working as it should. The system (not just Windows Explorer) sees the user profile as being on C:\, just as I was looking for. Thanks again.