Win7 Installation - Planning

In the last post I mentioned that I want to install Win7 in the most complicated way possible:

1. /Users on a Data drive (including Shared/Public/Common folders)
2. Page file on  a FAT32 partition
3. Hibernation file on a FAT32 partition
4. OS on a NTFS partition
5. /ProgramData on the Data drive

In this post I'm going to explore the various ways to move the user files to a data drive.

"Move" User Folders

Some people suggest to just move the "My Documents" folder to the Data drive.

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_shell_folders.htm

http://www.vista4beginners.com/Move-user-files-folders-to-another-partition

I don't like this because it seems like a partial goal. Also you'd still end up w/ the Temp folder, the Temp Internet folder, your AppData folder and a few others on the OS drive which goes against the whole purpose of having all the user data on the Data drive (for ease of backup).

Change the Registry
Other people suggest that you install Win7 as normal with a throwaway user ID, then go and change registry settings to point the user profile folder to your other drive, then recreate your users.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistasetup/thread/91aa8b26-2b09-4e56-955c-679b297832e1
(This link is a mishmash of different techniques)

http://joshmouch.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/change-user-profile-folder-location-in-vista/

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup&tid=1454df94-207c-4b75-95bb-9e92154d9827&cat=en_US_d02fc761-3f6b-402c-82f6-ba1a8875c1a7&lang=en&cr=&sloc=en-us&m=1&p=1
(This link is a pretty confusing set of forum posts. I think a lot of the questions and answers are interleaved within one comment post without the usual indentations to indicate a quote of a previous post.

I don't like this method of changing the registry because it seems like it's a lot of after the fact workarounds.

Symbolic Links / Junction Points

This one suggests to use junction points/mounts to redirect windows from where it thinks the folders are to where you actually want to put them.

http://www.vistax64.com/vista-installation-setup/42167-how-do-install-users-directory-different-drive.html

This isn't too bad; from my Linux background I used a lot of links (both symbolic and hard). But, this is still not a real answer. Waving your hand and misdirecting the OS is just an illusion. I want the OS to really know that these folders are in a new location.

However there are still a number of apps out there that hard code their paths and I may have to use this in combination with the method below to accommodate those sub-par apps.

Unattended Installation

The real answer seems to lie with doing an unattended install. With this you can actually tell Windows where you want its special folders before doing a clean install of the OS.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/12/10/9188555.aspx

Next post I'll get into the details of configuring an unattended installation...