User Profile - Change Default Location

So. I was able to get this to work with WS2008R2 a while back (couple of years) including being able to move the Program Files to another physical drive. All works great and when installing new apps, it knows the place to look to install. Same thing with IIS etc...

But its been a while and there were a few steps that I had to do to get it to work.

But now thinking afresh, I am going to be installing Windows 8.1 or Server 2012 R2. How can I do the same thing? I mean, I want to move the Users folder to another partition including the program files and also inetpuib (IIS).
I want the system to know the new correct location in the environment variables I guess, of the new home of the program files and the like.

any advice on this?

thanks.
I just cannot remember exactly what I did before to make it all work including Windows Update.

What approach do you recommend to redirect the users, program files, programdata etc... to another disk?
I remember I created an Environment variable called %RAIDDRIVE% and then changed some of the C:\ to %RAIDDRIVE% for things like the InetPub stuff, the user profiles and maybe some others too.

so I am almost done testing the changes and it almost works.
I managed to move the users, program files, program files x86 and programdata to the new drive.
I also modified a few registry entries to update the environment variables and also making sure Iexplore (Internet Explorer) points to the other drive. That works too.

The problem I face now is that when I install any application, it picks up the default location of Program files (C:\) rather than the moved location.

Looking at the environment variables from the CMD prompt, they seem correct (%ProgramFiles% and %ProgramFiles(x86)% point to the new drive)

what setting have I missed?

BTW - I have this already working on my existing system running Win7 but its been a while since I have done it.

managed to find the culprit. This was the HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion regkey

crap. I thought I had it working but now when it came for doing it on the real hardware.... it failed. Internet explorer will not start even after registering the IEProxy.dll

The reason it wont start is because I changed the program files path to the new drive. But I don't get it... works fine on my WS2008R2 system. :-/

agreed. But I was able to get this working on the WS2008R2 system I had for 3 years without issues. Thought I can get it done the same way for WS2012 R2.
must be doing something or missing something here. Crap.

happy for IE to run from C:\Program files etc... but want everything else (other program files and references) to be pointing to the other drive