Will Symlinks help me with connecting to folders in the older drive?

crackhammer · 12 Oct 2018

Hello folks,

Just installed 250GB SSD as my OS drive. The old 1TB drive will replace the DVD drive in the laptop. Ideally, I do not want anything on the OS/System drive other than the OS. I want to point all data to the older drive.

This includes all user folders like Video, Audio, Documents, Downloads etc. Ideally, I want to create links where when I access these folders, I will be directed to the same folders on the older 1TB drive. When I download something off the web to downloads folder, it will also go to the Downloads folder on 1TB drive. So the question I am asking, how do I achieve this?

While searching, I came across Symlinks. The detailed article is here at How-To (The Complete Guide to Creating Symbolic Links (aka Symlinks) on Windows ) I read this article a couple of times but I admit, I am not very clear if this will achieve what I want to do.

Can anyone give me idea(s) if I am on a right path? Is there any other (easier) option to achieve this?

Many thanks in advance.

Berton · 12 Oct 2018

It is a bit confusing as all the Notebooks I've worked on, rehabbed or junked could not replace the ODD/Optical Disc Drive with an HDD or SSD, just physically won't fit. There were, and may still be, a few Notebooks that had 2 drive bays in the case, the only ones I saw used the older PATA drives. I guess someone could have come up with an adapter kit to do it, would be interesting.

As to the program, it shouldn't be necessary if the added drive is properly recognized by the BIOS. File Explorer in Windows should handle simple file management and most programs I've dealt with allowed a Custom install and pointing to that added drive for location. Only caveat I ran into in the past was some versions of Microsoft Office still put quite a bit of itself on the same drive/partition as Windows was on, probably due to the interweaving with the OS.