Windows 7: User Profile - Change Default Location

I changed my logon from automatic to password and did a hard user switch. I was able to copy the user folder to the D: drive, but I wasn't able to completely delete the user folder from the system drive, C:. There are still a lot of hidden files in that folder that apparently didn't copy. App Data is one of those files. Is there a solution to copy all the files so the old user folder can be deleted?

Also, Windows Explorer shows that there is another folder under the C:\Users. It's the Public folder. How can that folder be moved to the D: drive?

Brink,

Thanks for another great tutorial. However, it caused issues and there are some tweaks that may be needed.

First, an overview of what I did. I had a 1TB C drive and wanted to put in a 250GB SSD for the OS, and move the extras to a D drive. (Kind of standard these days.) Moving my profile over to the D drive would shrink my OS files so they'd all fit on the smaller SSD.

I did it. Your tutorial was great. (I'd previously used Kari's sysprep on a different computer, so some of this seemed familiar. I like your way better. ) I moved the one user profile on the computer (named "Kids") from C/Users to D/Users. I created a new profile with admin privileges called "Tempmove", per your instructions, and then deleted it by right-clicking on the folder and selecting "delete".

Everything seemed good. C was the new SSD, D was a spinner, and everything fit and worked.

Except my HP8630 network printer. I could print notepad, but not anything else. After troubleshooting unsuccessfully, I decided to undo the profile move.

I shrank down (and moved) my D drive User files so everything would now fit on the SSD. I followed your tutorial to undo the move. I created another profile "Temp 4 move" to allow me to move "Kids" from the D to the C drive.

It worked.

Except...I lost my desktop background image, never to be found again. Okay, that's minor. I can now print as I should.

Here's the oddity: my registry contains some entries from "Tempmove" and "Temp 4 move". They're in the Profile List location your tutorial discusses. I've included some pix, with verbiage. (In order, the jpg's should be opened as "overview", "kids", "tempmove", and then "temp 4 move".)

Can I safely delete the 4 folders from Profile List? Or can I only delete the 2 orange ones (1019 and 1020)? Or none?

Should your tutorial include a step to delete these extra profiles from the registry?

Thanks,
Ken

Hello Ken, :)

Since you already deleted the accounts that 1019 and 1020 belong to, it would be safe to delete only these two from the registry.

The shorter ones are system accounts used by Windows, and should not be deleted.

Thank you!

You're most welcome. :)

Okay...two more oddities.

No matter what I do, I keep getting a users profile added to my D drive.

Also, I used to call my user profile "All" (yeah, bad name), so I renamed it "Kids". Now, I have a user profile "All" which I cannot delete.

Of the two, the new profile folders getting created on my D drive is the more problematic. See the attached screenshots. (And, yes, I did change the registry so that all new profiles are created on the C drive.)

"D won't go" shows what gets created everytime I use my main/only profile, "kids". I can delete it (by making another admin profile), but it reappears everytime I login to "kids".

The "user folder" shows the spurious "all" which I cannot get rid of.

The "account image" shows what I see when I log in to account manager.

Ken

quick question if i may and sorry if i missed this while reading through the tutorial. what would happen if i were to NOT delete the original location info but leave it be? i have moved the location just now and downloaded one app. and it put it in the new location and not the old all perfectly as it should i hope but i have not logged off or shut down the system yet either so was wondering if that would open a can of worms i'd rather not fool with?

Hello boomhauer, and welcome to Seven Forums.

You don't have to delete the folder at the original location.

thx brink. it will have no ill side effects if left there since nothing is going to it anymore ?

No side effects. You could treat it as a backup.