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Windows Vista/7 : Placing New User Accounts on a seperate partition

One of the irksome things with Windows is being able to place the entire user account subdirectory onto a seperate partition. Not just the Documents and Music folders (which you can move by right-clicking on and changing locations using the Properties dialog), but the whole shebang. This whole shebang is referred to as a ‘User Profile’.

I recently had the fortune to purchase a new laptop – a Sony Vaio BZ21VN – C2D P8700 2.53Ghz 4 Gb 400 Gb DVDRWDL 15.4 inch X-BLACK Vista Biz if you are interested – and thought I’d sort this out from the start.

Windows by default stores the User Profile under C:\Users – this is what used to be Documents and Settings under XP. The account created on startup will be placed there – so I called my initial account ‘Install’ – you have the freedom of keeping or disposing of this later as you like.

Once you’ve set up and updated Windows, clicked the 742 licence agreements and gone through the 16 restart cycles we can start dealing with the User Account location issue.

MAKE SURE YOU CREATED RESTORE DISKS OR HAVE YOUR INSTALL DISKS TO HAND  IN CASE SOMETHING GOES WRONG. NO LIABILITY ACCEPTED FOR THINGS THAT GO WRONG HERE!!!

Sort out the desired location of the user files

It can be either a second hard disk or a partition that you’ve created. Partitions can be created by going to Control Panel and typing in Partitions in the Search Panel to get to the Partition tool. (I like this tool a lot!).

Partitioning now feels a lot less scary than it used to be. Remember the C: drive will be for Windows and your programs you install – so give that an appropriate size to match – I use 100G for that. I also called the location of my user accounts the U: drive.

Setup Accounts

If you go to the C:\Users folder there will be folders labelled Public and the one you created at startup. There is also one hidden folder here – Default – which forms the template for new users. You can view the hidden folder by going to Organize->Folders and Search Options->View->Display Hidden Files and folders.

Copy the Public and the Default ones across to your new location. So I ended up with U:\Public and U:\Default.

Now comes the registry editing!

This is the tricky part. You go into the Windows Registry by going to the start menu (or Orb Menu as it may be called), and type Regedit in the search box. An explorer type window should appear. In the left hand side, we need to find for certain items and change them from C:\Users to the new destination folder/drive (i.e. U: in my case). Navigate in the left hand pane to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Registry values to change are:

1. Public becomes: U:\Public (or your equivalent)
2. Default becomes U:\Default (or your equivalent)
3. ProfilesDirectory becomes U:\ (or your equivalent)

Log off and Log in again.

You will now be ready to create your new user accounts. Once these have been done you can either delete the original account, or keep it. In particular it may be useful if you have a second hard disk with the user data on it that ends up failing, or you want all the other accounts to be standard, non-Administrator accounts.