Needing help moving personal folders to data partition.

I'm not sure if this is the right category, but I could really use someone who could baby-step me through the steps to moving my personal folders(documents, pictures, videos, etc) to a data partition that I made for that purpose. I don't know exactly what I did wrong. I need 2 user names, and when I tried it for the first user (my husband) with some sample files, it moved over, but instead of having a "documents" or "My Documents", it changed the name of my first user, Panga to "My Documents"
it also changed the letter of my drive. Originally, the Data partition was "X", but it changed it to Data (E). Is this normal and did I do something wrong or stupid? I used "v. laurie's tip on How to Move Windows 7 Personal Folders Like My Documents to Another Drive | Gizmo's Freeware

Here were the instructions.
Open the Start menu and click your user name to open the User folder
1. Right-click the personal folder you want to redirect to another location.
2. Select “Properties”
3. Click the tab “Location”
4. The dialog box shown below will open
5. Click the button “Move”
6. An Explorer dialog “Select a destination” will open
7. Browse to the location where you want to redirect this folder. You can select another location on this computer, another drive attached to this computer, or another computer on the network
8. Click the folder where you want to store the files (not the root of a drive)
9. Click the button “Select Folder”
10. Click “OK”
11. In the dialog that appears, click “Yes” to move all the files to the new location.

Are these instructions even right?

And that's when it happened. When I went to check, just the "Documents". I didn't put anything else", it said not "Panga" but "My Documents".

Did I do it wrong? Did I do something dumb? Did I miss a step? I've never done it before, so I panicked, and luckily I set a restore point and went back to the way I had it. The folder still stayed that way on the Data Partition, which was now E. I cleared it out, and changed the name back to "Panga" which might not have been my brightest move.
I really need someone to guide me through the steps so this doesn't happen again. I'm really getting frustrated. Things were going so well up to then.

Do I need to delete the partition and start again? I have:
An HP Compaq 6000 Pro running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. I have a core 2 Duo processor e8400 running at 3 Ghz. 8 GB of RAM, a 2 TB hard drive (mechanical, not SSD)
onboard graphics with the motherboard, which is Hewlett-Packard 3048h (XU1 PROCESSOR), and a Dell CRT monitor if that helps. My Data Partition is 878 GB, and 905 GB on my C/: Partition.

So if anyone can help me, I'd really appreciate it because I'm scared I'll do something wrong and break Windows or my hard drive. I need a 1-2-3 step or A-B-C type of thing in order.

I saw a post from PC World on how to do this, and I'm not sure which is right because there are upteen different steps to take, and do you add folders inside the username folders on the partition or how exactly are you supposed to do it that is the easiest and the least aggravating and waste of my time so I have to start over. I need to be able to access the folders from the start menu. So please help. Feeling a loss of confidence here. Is it even advisable so when I back up it only backs up our files, not the system files which is what happened the first time I used Window Vista's backup program?

Any help would be extremely helpful.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely yours,
Katherine Logan AKA "Maghdalena"

What you did was MOVE the folders rather then a COPY. I hope your restore point fixed that because these instructions are NOT what you want to do.

This is largely a copy and paste operation. I'm sure Windows has a built-in facility to do this, but I don't use it. All you need to do is say, you want to copy the Videos folder. Just right click the Videos folder, selct copy, now go to the partation for backup and paste. Do this for the other folders you want to backup.

But I gotta tell you. This is not a full secure way of a backup. Partitions can go POOF! Gone, disappear like magician's flash paper. And since it's on the same hard drive, if the hard drive bites the dust all is lost. You're best backup solution would be to buy an external USB hard drive that's large enough for all of your data. Then do the simple copy/paste maneuver that I talked about. Better yet. Clone the whole enchilada. That way if your current mechanical (I call it a platter) hard drive bites the dust you can clone back to a new hard drive and all wil be like nothing ever changed.

You can use the free AOMEI Backupper and chose the clone option. Select your source drive which is your current Windows drive, and then select the destination drive which would be the USB external hard drive. Clone away and have a cup of tea or what ever as you wait. I store my cloned external hard drives in a fireproof safe rated for electronics. If you do that place the hard drive in a ziplock bag as fire will make the inside of the safe moist.

Just food for thought.

Wait, is this a backup, or do you in fact want to MOVE folders to another partition? If that is the case then may I ask why?

She's talking about moving? to a new partition which would not save wear and tear on a SSD.

F22 Simpilot said:

Wait, is this a backup, or do you in fact want to MOVE folders to another partition? If that is the case then may I ask why?

I wanted to move them to another partition because the first time I backed up with the Vista Back up program ended up backing up all files, not just mine but the system files (files and images) for Windows Vista and the program files and images for things like MS Office. There was so much I lost some files I would have preferred not to. It took me 1 year and a half to 2 years to clear up that mess. I got most of them, but there were some errors. That was a nightmare I never want to repeat, so I wanted to put my files in a data partition away from the Windows files and files for the programs that I had. I don't know if that helps or not. I will never use Windows Vista or 7's Back up programs again! After I finished that and before I moved to this computer, I moved all my folders manually to my external hard drive and didn't lose one.

Once I have them on a separate partition away from the Windows system files and program files which need to be on the C drive(I kind of get that and no problem there, I plan to have someone at iDrive talk me through setting up the back up software so it only backs up our files, not *all* files. I don't know if that helps, but that's why.

F22 Simpilot said:

What you did was MOVE the folders rather then a COPY. I hope your restore point fixed that because these instructions are NOT what you want to do.

This is largely a copy and paste operation. I'm sure Windows has a built-in facility to do this, but I don't use it. All you need to do is say, you want to copy the Videos folder. Just right click the Videos folder, selct copy, now go to the partation for backup and paste. Do this for the other folders you want to backup.

But I gotta tell you. This is not a full secure way of a backup. Partitions can go POOF! Gone, disappear like magician's flash paper. And since it's on the same hard drive, if the hard drive bites the dust all is lost. You're best backup solution would be to buy an external USB hard drive that's large enough for all of your data. Then do the simple copy/paste maneuver that I talked about. Better yet. Clone the whole enchilada. That way if your current mechanical (I call it a platter) hard drive bites the dust you can clone back to a new hard drive and all wil be like nothing ever changed.

You can use the free AOMEI Backupper and chose the clone option. Select your source drive which is your current Windows drive, and then select the destination drive which would be the USB external hard drive. Clone away and have a cup of tea or what ever as you wait. I store my cloned external hard drives in a fireproof safe rated for electronics. If you do that place the hard drive in a ziplock bag as fire will make the inside of the safe moist.

Just food for thought.

I *do* have a Seagate External hard drive. I don't know that much about cloning a hard drive though. I have Ease Us, but I'm just learning the program. When I backed up our files before moving to this computer I copied them over folder by folder, that is "Documents, Video, Pictures, Music and then checked one. At least then it wasn't a mess.

As far as the restore, it seems to have worked with my husband's file(since I only tried moving over one, when that goofed up, it made a big mess, I panicked and didn't move anything else.. I can see the libraries (see attached images) So I think it's OK, I've put some more in and it shows in the main library, not in the data partition. Did you need an image of the data partition and "Panga's" user folder. It's empty though.

I feel like a complete idiot. I'm of limited means, though and don't have the money for a fireproof safe for the external drive if I *do* clone it to the external hard drive (which is also a mechanical drive) I just want to prevent a mess when I use a backup program for my files as I mentioned in another post here at the forum. Thanks for explaining that that wasn't what I wanted to do, move rather than copy them over? I'm wanting to redirect the location, I guess. Oh, this is frustrating.

Actually, most of my files are still on the external hard drive. Should I move them to the documents and pictures, music and video libraries before doing anything else?

Thanks a lot for any help you can give me.
Katherine Logan AKA "Maghdalena"

Thanks a lot. That clears things up more than a bit. So I have my User folder, in this case, "Panga" and "Maghdalena", then documents, videos, music, pictures, etc, then once I have my documents, then do the actual moving to each folder one at a time. That makes so much more sense than what I did before. I'll let you know how things go. I have a test account I can try it out at, that way, hopefully it won't be screwed up. Should I set up a restore point before actually moving the files? Other than that, I'll let you know if I run into any problems, and restore. If I need to, I do the restore default from the data partttion, right?


Thanks again,
Maghdalena