I use Windows 7 just as much as I use Linux, in a lot of ways, both OSs are cool, though sometimes you just wish that you can do things in one or the other.
One of the things that is really hard to do in Windows is moving your home folder to another partition in an elegant way. I know that windows supports moving parts of the home folder, but that breaks a lot of things, for example, the Android SDK breaks, and remains unfixed.
However, I discovered that it is possible to have your home folder in another partition yet having everything working, and that method uses windows symlinks.
http://serverfault.com/questions/8187/whats-the-best-way-to-move-c-users-to-d-users-under-vista-w7
I will iterate some the of steps, because it won’t work if you just blindly follow it.
- You will need to boot up using your windows installation media, flash or optical disks are fine.
- Rather than clicking “Install Now”, you click “Repair now”
- Select your Windows installation and open up command prompt (should be one of the options)
- mountvol should show you a list of mount points
- robocopy x:\Users y:\Users /mir /xj /copyall The x and y should be the drive letters that the drive that is currently mounted, it should be some weird letters, such as E of F
- rmdir /S /Q x:\Users Use this to remove the origin drive home directory
- mklink x:\Users d:\Users /j You need to change x into the origin drive letter, and d should be your destination drive after booting, i.e NOT y
- mklink /J “x:\Documents and Settings” d:\Users This is to fix the broken link so that legacy apps for WinXP are still usable
- Reboot and enjoy