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Trouble moving system folders to 2nd drive... corruption of folders
Hi folks, this is my first time posting here.
This looks like the right place for a post like this.
I'm pretty knowledgeable. I've been building my own PCs for 20+ years.
I've been out of practice for a while, but I did a ton of research when I decided to build two PCs recently.
Even back in the day when most people only used one HDD, I would always insist on a two drive system, physically separating DATA from OS and apps. These days everybody is booting from SSDs, so this is a lot more common.
But I'm having one heck of a glitch that has me stumped.
If somebody has seen this before, I would love to hear some suggestions.
I built the system and tested it by booting into Ubuntu from a USB flash drive. No drives were installed yet, but I could get on the internet and run apps like LibraOffice. So I know the system works. Next step is to install Windows 7.
I connect the SDD drive into a SATA3 port, connect the optical drive into one of the SATA2 ports, and I leave the HDD with the data cable unplugged.
I boot from the optical disk and do a clean install of Windows 7 onto the SSD.
I install drivers from a USB flash drive, and finally get an internet connection.
I activate Windows and allow the updates.
Then I shut down.
Next I unplug the data cable from the optical drive and I plug the HDD into a SATA3 port.
Then I power up.
Windows boots from the SSD.
I use disk manager to create one big partition on the HDD and format in NTFS.
I make sure the drives are assigned the letters C: and D:
Then I restart.
I double check that the C: drive is the SSD with everything, and D: is the HDD with nothing.
Now I want to move the system folders "My Documents", "My Music", "My Pictures", etc over to the D: drive.
I use Windows Explorer to create a folder on D: called "Data".
I navigate up to C:\Users\Steve where I select the "My Documents" folder and select "properties".
I select the "location" tab and click "move".
I navigate over to D:\Data and "select folder".
Now here is where things get weird.
After I hit "apply", the location field no longer points to it's old location C:\Users\Steve, NOR does it point to where I just pointed it "D:\Data".
Instead it now points to "D:". It's pointing to the D: drive itself, or perhaps the root directory of the D: drive.
Confused and baffled, I decide to repeat the procedure with the next system folder "C:\Users\Steve\My Pictures".
When I try to move the location, the "Data" folder does not even exist on the D: drive anymore... I can only choose the root directory.
After that, "My Pictures" ends up INSIDE "My Documents" instead of at the same level.
I could use the properties tab to restore defaults for the location of "My Pictures" and it was put back to C:\Users\Steve.
However, the system would not allow me to restore the default location of "My Documents"... it seemed to think I was trying to restore the entire D: drive into a folder on the C: drive.
Frustrated, I booted Ubuntu from a flash drive and GParted all drives back to nothing and repeated the procedure from scratch.
This time I went one level further on the D: drive. I created the nested folders called D:\Users\Steve.
Then all I had to do was change locations from "C:\Users\Steve" to "D:\Users\Steve".
A similar thing occurred... "C:\Users\Steve\My Documents" didn't move location to "D:\Users\Steve". Instead it went to "D:\Users". Any further attempts to move system folders ended up nested inside the previous system folder, not at the same level.
This is not supposed to work like this.
If anybody has seen this before, I would greatly appreciate some help !
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