Windows – How to relink user folders in Windows 7

file locationuser-folderswindows 7

The short story:
Win7 lost track of my user folders location (desktop, my documents, my pictures etc…). They now reside on a different partition. How can I relink these folders?

The long story:
The way I partition my drives is:

C: – SSD drive for Windows and Program Files
D: – A large regular hard drive for all my user data

The first thing I do after a fresh Win7 install is move my user folders to D:, by right clicking on these folders under C:\users\username\, choosing the Location tab and clicking on Move.

I've just completed encryption of D: using TrueCrypt. It shows a lot of warnings before the encryption process, but (hrrmm…) it does not mention the fact that after encryption the data is located on a new drive letter, say E:

This broke Win7's links to my special user folders. How can I relink these folders?

Best Answer

After the encryption, the drive is no longer recognized by Windows 7 and it usually asks you to format the drive. You then have to mount the drive with Truecrypt and assign a drive letter to it, in your case E:

To relink the folders, do the same process that you applied to the D: and use E: instead or whatever you have set for the drive.

The files and folder structure are all still the same, the only major change after encryption is the drive letter. Anything that referred to D: must now be changed to refer to E:.

There are also some registry tweaks available but most people are not comfortable in changing those.

Here is the registry path to the User Shell Folders.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

Related Solutions

Windows – Script to move specific user folders in Windows 7

I usually move the folders to my separate partition and then symlink them back into the C:\Users folder. This has the advantage that legacy apps that tend to break on custom paths can access the folder as usual.

This snippet of batch script should do what you want. Note that you have to run it as Administrator for symlinking to work ( untested, YMMV ):

::Change this to the folder where you want to store your data
set DESTFOLDER="Z:\Path\on\other\partition"

::Switch to the current user's profile folder
::Change this to the folder you want to move from if you are moving another user's data
set SOURCEFOLDER="%USERPROFILE%"
pushd "%SOURCEFOLDER%"
for /d %%d in (Documents Music Pictures Videos) do
(
  ::Move the folder to the new partition
  move "%%d" "%DESTFOLDER%\%%d"
  ::Symlink it back to the original location
  mklink /d "%%d" "%DESTFOLDER%\%%d"
)

This is just of the top of my head, but it's similar to what I use for my Ubuntu install, where I symlink all of the subfolders of my home folder to my NTFS data partition.

Windows – Forcing Windows to mount a drive with a specific drive letter

If you change the drive letter once, Windows should remember that.

You should also try to find out what causes the BSODs. I doubt that it's TrueCrypt alone since it runs on thousands of PCs without crashing them.

So maybe make a screenshot and post that here. We might be able to point you in the right direction.

On top of that, this blog post might help, too. Or Google for "truecrypt bsod".

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Script to move specific user folders in Windows 7

Windows – Forcing Windows to mount a drive with a specific drive letter

Related Question