Move your Documents And Settings USERNAME profile off of the C: drive

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From the computer of: ibe98765 (3 recipes)
Created: Jun 03, 2006     Updated: Jun 07, 2006

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Microsoft (and too many other amateurs) dump everything onto the C: drive. They aren't cognizant of the advantages of using partitioning or logical drives. What follows is a power user tip that allows you to relatively easily move ALL your personalized settings in C:\Documents and Settings to another partition. This is a damm sight easier than messing with TweakUI, X-Setup, etc. I keep my settings on my D: drive. This way, if I have to wipe the C: drive to refresh Windows, I can easily get most of my settings and old files back instead of starting from ground zero. This has worked for me in Win2k and WinXP and has made systems refreshes a lot easier over the years. Note that you're really just changing one registry sub-key here. The rest is just to logoff the user account, copy the settings to the new location and then logon to the user account.

Step 1
1. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
2. Under this key, there will be some number of profiles (usually 6), each of these which represents a user name that you will find under C:\Documents and Settings.
3. Click on each PROFILE key entry and look at the value ProfileImagePath to identify which one represents your username.
4. Inside the registry editor, using RegEdit or a clone registry editing program (I use Registrar Lite), edit this ProfileImagePath value that represents your username and CHANGE the path to where you want to move your settings to. In my case, I wanted to move my settings from C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME to "D:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME".
5. Save this new path value in the registry editing program.
6. Now export the whole profile key that contains this value. You will be prompted for a file name to save the exported information to. Pick a location on your hard disk (not on the C drive) and export the key. When you finish the export and look at the output file, it should look something like this (note that exported filename locations inside the registry always represent a single "\" character with two "\\" characters)

7. Delete everything below your new path name. It should now look like this:

Step 2
1. Now do a full reboot (don't just logoff/on) and sign into the ADMINISTRATOR account
2. Copy C:\Documents and Settings\Username folder (including all sub-folders) to the new path location where the target users personal settings are to be saved (D:\Documents and Settings\XYZ in this example).
3. Logoff the Administrator account and back onto the User account
4. Run the registry file you previously exported to and edited with the .REG extension (right-click it and choose merge)
5. Reboot the computer again and logon to the USER account
6. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Username and try to delete the complete folder structure
8. If Windows allows you to do this, then you have successfully transferred your settings to the new path location and all is well. Voila!

9. If Windows says that you can't delete it because it or something in it is required by the system, then you've done something wrong. Open Regedit and make sure that you have modified the correct location for the user account and that it has been correctly updated.
10. If you have the right location and it hasn't been updated, figure out why.
11. You might have to do a system restore if you've messed something up badly, so take a backup before and be prepared to do this if necessary.
12. Generally, an imaging program that can be initiated from DOS is the best way to restore everything if you run into problems.