Move Users Folder Location in Windows 10  

Hyourinmaru said:

1. Can I apply this "How to" to an existing Windows 10, which should be upgraded to a newer Version due to the Feature Update, i.e from Version 1803 to 1809 or 1809 to 1903 (in the future)?

Yes, see Method Two in tutorial.

Please notice that whereas Method One, relocating Users folder in new, clean install is totally risk free, Method Two (relocating Users folder in an existing installation) occasionally fails and is therefore not recommended, at least not without creating a full system backup first.

Hyourinmaru said:

2. Can I use in the unattended answer file the volume GUID instead of the drive letter?

No.

Kari

wwwaller said:

I have a new HP Omen with 128GB SSD and 1TB HDD. When I try to enter Audit mode at the region selection as described in tutorial, after the reboot, the Sysprep running box is displayed. I've tried letting it run, and after about 5 minutes it does, but then reboots and repeats the running Sysprep, reboot sequence, in an apparently infinite loop.

Screenshot from beginning of the tutorial:

wwwaller said:

If I am successfully able to run the procedure, what happens when Microsoft pushes out an upgrade 190x? Some posts and replies seem to imply that I have to move the data back to C: (impossible because it is not large enough).

Relocated Users folder does not cause any whatsoever update or upgrade issues.

Kari

wwwaller said:

When I said Sysprep was running, I meant the Progress Box that appears when you run the script in Step 3 of your initial procedure.

The one that says Sysprep is running and processing plugins.... It runs for about 5 minutes and exits with a new reboot in audit mode that has the running message with green progress bar. This seems to be an infinite loop, it reboots with the Sysprep running and processing plugins message and completes after 5 minutes reboots again, and comes up in same state. If I click the X box nothing happens (there is no cancel button), and if I kill with task manager nasty things occurs (restoring system from a system recovery USB).

If I try to enter audit later (next question after language), I do not get any Sysprep message, but process does not work, nor does the process for an existing install, your second procedure).

Why does Microsoft not have a built in solution in Windows or WIndows installation?

You've done something incorrectly - my *first* guess is to look more carefully at the commands that you type in to get SysPrep running.

One of the more common mistakes that Kari has seen (FWIW, I made this mistake once, maybe even twice, back a long time ago) is in the following command:

Code:

%windir%\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /oobe /reboot /unattend:d:\relocate.xml

The mistake is that, when looking at the code online and manually typing it, some people (including, as I said, yours truly) have typed /unattended as the last parameter instead of /unattend.

Another issue, though this should actually throw up a warning and kill sysprep rather quickly, is if you have the file named differently than what you specify.

Also, go back and make sure that the contents of the relocate.xml file are exactly as Kari has listed.

In practice, what I have done is create both relocate.xml as well as a batch file (relocate.bat) that contain the commands from Step 3, saved both to my HDD (mechanical HDD that never gets erased) and after creating a USB for clean WinX install, I'll copy both of those files to the USB device, so they are (easily) available to me during clean installs, which I sometimes perform with my mechanical drives disconnected and only the SSDs connected, both of which get wiped during clean installs.

Well, actually, this method moves the *entire* \Users tree to another drive of your choice.

If all you're concerned about is the special folders insider your profile, such as Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos, you can move those yourself - but after an 'update' to Windows 10, you may (probably) have to move them again. I do this because those 4 folders have *LOT* of data, dating back as far as 25 years ago, that I still want to have on hand, so keeping them on mechanical drives that don't get formatted (often) makes more sense to me than having to make a *huge* backup of files every time I want to update Windows, or even clean install.

I actually do *both* - use this method to move the \Users tree from my primary SSD to my secondary SSD (for various reasons, the main of which is that I just like keeping that entire profile tree separate from the actual system drive), and then I *manually* move the 4 folders I listed above using the information as in the following tutorials:

Documents Folder - Move Location in Windows 10 | Tutorials

Move Location of Music Folder in Windows 10 | Tutorials

Move Location of Pictures Folder in Windows 10 | Tutorials

Move Location of Videos Folder in Windows 10 | Tutorials

And then, on every build update where I get doubled folders (see below) (being an Insider, I get a lot of those 'updates' versus the standard twice a year for non-Insiders), I go though and restore the locations using this tutorial:

Restore Default Location of Personal Folders in Windows 10 | Tutorials

And then move them again.

The reason is that, sometimes with an update to a newer version, my moves get broken (although they are not supposed to) and I see 2 versions of every folder that I have moved, the default and the ones I previously moved. So, I fix the discrepancy.

Incidentally, upgrading from Insiders build 18334 to Skip-ahead build 18836 did *NOT* cause them to appear doubled, so maybe they are slowly but sure making progress here....()shell:UsersFilesFolder I was wrong - they didn't show up in Explorer when I first opened it up, but when I went to shell:UsersFilesFolder the duplicates are there yet again ....

Finally, as for no one commenting on why we have to do this ourselves (I'll shy away from calling it an unsupported script, as it is using only officially available methods and existing software installed to achieve this (An expanded explanation is that this method is probably documented somewhere in the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) for corporations to use the images that they create for their users, which they clone out to devices, which is much faster than installing and setting up Windows on each individual device) - uh, even though we have several Micro$oft MVPs here, I think that there are very, very few actual Micro$oft employees here, and only they can answer why Micro$oft would do this - most of us here in the forums cannot. So, the answer truly is: "Because that's the way M$ does things."

One more thing - @Kari - this is with an HP pre-built system - wasn't there something about how Sysprep would default to using the built in answer file from the OEM at one point or another?

johngalt said:

One more thing - @Kari - this is with an HP pre-built system - wasn't there something about how Sysprep would default to using the built in answer file from the OEM at one point or another?

Yes. The answer file is searched in various locations, according to certain search order. This Microsoft Docs support article shows the default search order: Windows Setup Automation Overview | Microsoft Docs

Kari