Transfer of standard user folders. Moving a user profile using standard Windows tools. How to transfer user folders to another local drive

Moving user profiles to another drive and changing the path to them is a very difficult task. However, it is quite feasible, and with several different ways. Once the migration is successfully completed, the old profile folders can be deleted without any problems.

Let's say you need to transfer a profile from drive C: to drive D:. It doesn't make sense to just copy the profile files because it won't work.

The simplest and affordable way– use the Transfer Tool Windows data(Windows Easy Transfer). This way you can transfer absolutely the entire profile, including the AppData folder and various system links associated with the profile.

First of all, you need to log into the account that we will transfer. Then open the Transfer Tool. To do this, click on the button Start and go to menu All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Windows Easy Transfer.

Windows Easy Transfer will launch, in which, in fact, you just need to select the location where the user data will be saved. It is best to transfer them to an external HDD or a USB flash drive, although no one bothers you to choose a network drive.

As a result, we will get a file with a .MIG extension in which precious data will be stored.

1. Log in with an Administrator account and delete old profile and all of its files (if you’re scared, you can first save them in a safe place).

2. Open the editor system registry (Start > regedit).

3. Go to the system registry branch HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.

4. Find the value and specify the address of the new folder for it - say, D:\Users.

5. Reboot.

6. Log in with an Administrator account.

7. Create a new user account (see “Windows 7 Accounts”). Name it the same as the deleted account - however, this is just for convenience.

8. Log out and log in with the new account you just created. Now the profile folder will be created where we specified earlier for the ProfilesDirectory value.

9. All that remains is to find the previously created .MIG file and double-click on it. The wizard will transfer all user information to new profile. If the name of the new account does not match the old one, then in the Transfer Wizard, in additional parameters, you just need to specify a new name.

This method applies to transferring a profile to a long time ago installed system. However, sometimes it makes sense to do this immediately after Windows installations 7.

Choosing a user profile location when installing Windows 7

If you are reinstalling or installing Windows 7 from scratch, it is convenient to immediately select a new location for the future user profile at the installation stage.

After the main steps of installing Windows 7, we will stop at the window where you need to create a new user in the system. Do not rush to indicate it and click to open a command prompt window.

Now let's move the profile to a new location. In our example, we move the C:\Users folder to the E:\Users folder, as well as the ProgramFiles and ProgramData folders.

1. Copy the profiles, Program Files and ProgramData folder to a new location.

Robocopy "C:\Users" "E:\Users" /E /COPYALL /XJ robocopy "C:\Program Files" "E:\Program Files" /E /COPYALL /XJ robocopy "C:\ProgramData" "E: \ProgramData" /E /COPYALL /XJ

2. Delete old folders and create the necessary connections between folders.

Program Files folder:

Rmdir "C:\Program Files" /S /Q mklink /J "C:\Program Files" "E:\Program Files"

Rmdir "C:\users" /S /Q mklink /J "C:\users" "E:\users"

ProgramData folder:

Rmdir "C:\ProgramData" /S /Q mklink /J "C:\ProgramData "E:\ProgramData"

It is likely that when deleting folders with the command rmdir An error message will appear. You can delete these folders later, after a reboot.

Now enter regedit to open the system registry editor.

Go to the next thread:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

Change the path to the ProgramFilesDir and CommonFilesDir folders by entering the E:\ drive instead of the C:\ drive.

Now go to the list of user profiles and change the paths again to E:\ instead of C:\.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Close the system registry editor. Now enter the following command:

shutdown /r /t 0

The computer will be turned off, turn it on again. The user creation stage will appear again, create it and this will complete the installation of Windows 7 and the transfer of profiles.

In the Windows operating system (in all its versions) there is a so-called user folder, which contains folders for storing the desktop, videos, documents, for downloading files from the Internet, for music, images, and others that are used less frequently. Since the folders are initially located on the system drive “C”, over time this drive may become full. And if you bought yourself a small SSD drive, then most likely there will not be enough space for the files stored in the user’s folders. In this case, the location of these folders must be moved to another local disk, for example, “D” and I will talk about this in this article.

Now in more detail... These user folders are primarily created for the convenience of the user, because they allow you to conveniently sort your information on the computer through the explorer, for example, put videos, films, etc. in the “Video” folder, photos, pictures - in the “Images” folder, Well, what you place on the desktop is automatically placed in the “Desktop” folder. Moreover, the appearance of these folders is initially optimized in the system for certain data, videos, photos, music. And you don’t need to create your own folders for everything you have on your computer. In general, whether to use them or not is everyone’s business.

If these folders are actively used for their intended purpose, the information in them will fill up a lot of disk space. As an example, my entire user folder takes up more than 600 GB. What's wrong with that, you ask? Nothing bad, actually, but the problem will arise when there is not enough space on your system disk. At the same time, increase or decrease the size system disk- this is a dangerous operation in which you can break Windows itself, i.e. it will stop starting.

You can read information about resizing local disks

And some users store most of their information on the desktop, which, accordingly, will also take up space on the C: drive.

It may be news to some that the desktop in Windows is also a folder. Yes, that is right. The folder is called “Desktop” (or Desktop) and it is located in the folder of the system user you are working under, on drive C:

Or another option. Now many people put it under their system SSD drives, instead of the usual hard drives. And these SSDs are very expensive, that is, they cost much more than HDDs (hard drives), 2 or even 3 times more expensive. Because they work many times faster and Windows generally works much faster with them. Since these disks are expensive, they are usually purchased in such a capacity that they are only enough to install Windows and programs for it. This is approximately 120 GB, a size that is enough for most for these purposes. But these 120 GB are no longer enough to store all the information on the computer, especially in the user’s folders, since it is initially located on the same local drive as Windows.

Here, above, I gave 2 examples due to which you may need to change the location of the user’s folders, especially the “Desktop” folder, and both of these examples are associated with a lack of free space on the “C” drive.

Let's move on to practice...

How to transfer user folders to another local drive.

The user folder itself is standardly located at the following path in Windows: C:\Users\Vladimir

Instead of “Vladimir” you will have the name of your Windows account.

Sometimes the "Users" folder may be called "Users".

In your user folder you will see something like this:

All of the user's folders are displayed here, such as "Desktop", "Documents", "Downloads", etc. There may also be other folders here, for example, as in the image above, which are not circled in red. Such folders can be created by some programs, i.e. this is normal.

In some cases, folders may be named in English:

• Downloads = Downloads
• Desktop = Desktop
• Favorites = Favorites
• Pictures = Pictures
• Contacts = Contacts
• Videos = My videos (in new Windows versions called "Video")
• Documents = My Documents (called “Documents” in newer versions of Windows)
• Music = My Music (called “Music” in newer versions of Windows)
• Searches = Searches
• Saved Games = Saved games
• Link = Links

To change the folder location, you need to right-click on the desired folder (hereinafter referred to as “RMB”) and select “Properties”. Go to the “Location” tab (1) and click “Move” (2).

Will open Windows Explorer, where you need to select the folder to which the current one will be moved. It is better to create a new one for the target folder (to which you are transferring the current one) with the same name, but on a different local drive.

Example. Move the “Downloads” folder from the old location to the new one. The old location in the example is: C:\Users\Vladimir We create a folder with the same name “Downloads” on the 2nd local drive. Accordingly, when moving the old folder, in the “Location” tab we select already new folder"Downloads" that you created.

After selecting a new location, click “Apply” in the window.

If you have any files in your Downloads folder, the system will offer to move them all to the new location that you have chosen. Better files move. To do this, click “Yes” in the window.

We do the same with all other folders that are in your user’s folder. That is, we first create a folder with the same name in another local drive, then transfer the old folder to it.

Of course, you may not directly transfer all the folders, but it’s better to do it anyway so that you definitely don’t have anything taking up extra space on the “C” drive. And for those who like to store a lot of files directly on the desktop (I do this myself sometimes), I strongly recommend moving the “Desktop” folder! :)

Hello dear readers of the blog www.site. Today we will complete the description of the process transfer operating system Windows 7 with saving user profiles, installed programs, data and settings on two hard drives. One of the drives is a solid state drive SSD 60 GB, the second is a regular mechanical one HDD.

The decision to make a dual configuration hard drives was taken after the volumes occupied by the operating system and user data. Due to the fact that in total they clearly exceeded 60 GB, it was not possible to transfer everything to one small SSD drive.

Looking ahead, I will say that for desktop computer This decision turned out to be not only successful, but also very profitable from a financial point of view. The total cost of a small SSD and a mechanical HDD is still less than the cost of one large solid-state drive.

Even if you don’t mind the money “for yourself,” most likely, the volume of one SSD really won’t be enough. For example, my photo folders alone take up about 130 GB. And this despite the fact that photographs are mainly in jpg format. And who has it in RAW? What if it's a video? What I mean is that you will still have to either install another HDD or connect an external one.

As for the speed of the system, there were initially serious concerns about whether transferring Windows 7 user profiles to a regular mechanical disk would negatively affect it. The fears were not confirmed - everything “flies”. No, the computer's response would probably be even faster if the solid-state drive contained not only the operating system, but also the data. But something tells me that in most practical cases this difference would not be very noticeable.

Let's return to the process. Last time we moved the operating room Windows system 7 on an SSD disk and user profiles on a mechanical HDD. To transfer user profiles, we tried to use the Windows Easy Transfer wizard, standard for Windows 7.

Unfortunately, the result was not quite what I would like to see - the settings of some programs were not saved. This can be partly explained by the fact that during such a profile transfer, the absolute paths to the files change and some programs do not find them. Apparently, it makes sense to use Windows Easy Transfer to solve the tasks for which it is directly intended. In a word, this is not Linux, where you can mount any partition on any disk in \home.

Today I will describe the second, very simple way to transfer Windows 7 user folders to another drive. The idea of ​​such a transfer was suggested to me by the Microsoft wizard at the moment when it refused to expand the saved profiles to the second disk and I had to trick it by creating symbolic links. So we will use them to the fullest.

Transferring Windows 7 User Folders Using Symbolic Links

We return to the moment when preliminary optimization of the space occupied by the system on the C: drive has already been done, but the original user profiles from the C: drive have not yet been deleted. We copy user directories to any available location or directly to where they are supposed to be located ultimately.

This can be done in various ways, the main thing is to preserve permissions on files and folders and not lose system and hidden ones. For example, using the command xcopy V command line with administrator rights:

xcopy C:\Users\UserName\ X:\Users\UserName\ /E /H /O /X

UserName– user profile directory name;

X:\Users\UserName– destination folder;

/E

/H– hidden and system files are copied;

/O— ACL access control lists and owner data are saved;

/X– file audit information is copied.

Or, also on the command line, with the command robocopy:

robocopy C:\Users\UserName\ X:\Users\UserName\ /E /COPYALL /XJ

C:\Users\UserName, X:\Users\UserName– source and result;

/E– directories with subdirectories, including empty ones, are copied;

/COPYALL– all information about the files is copied (owner information, audit information, etc.);

/XJ— exclude connection points.

Team robocopy It is interesting in that it is designed for data replication and can remove “extra” files from the replica. It can be successfully used to create backup copies without completely overwriting all files.

13 comments

Well, I did everything right. Rebooted, everything worked ok. And then the OS even stopped loading. I can't even reinstall Windows. Only black screen.

• Rustam, the problem you are experiencing cannot be related to the transfer of profiles. In any case, on C:\, even if you did not specifically create a new user whose profile cannot be transferred, as recommended in the article, there is an “Administrator”. If everything is fine with the system itself, then if the second disk with the transferred profiles is unavailable, such horrors cannot happen - Windows will boot. Tell us in more detail at what point the black screen appears, after which it started. And what does it mean

  I can't even reinstall Windows

1. The fact of the matter is that I only had one Administrator profile. I then transferred it from SSD to HHD. Then on drive D, where I transferred the Administrator profile, I did invisible folder Users. Rebooted the laptop. Windows won't boot. Even the Windows logo does not appear. I decided to reinstall the OS, AHCI mode The installation does not start at all. When I switch to IDE mode, it stumbles at the “installation begins” step. No further. Although I had previously installed the same copy of Windows with this flash drive on the same ultrabook.
   It looks like something is wrong in the BIOS or what?

   I want to connect my laptop to my computer and format all the drives. Could you tell me how to connect a laptop and view all its contents from the computer?

   • You have something very complicated in mind. It's easier to view the content by booting from a Live CD. For example, Parted Magic with GParted. I wrote about him. I would also like to understand what kind of Windows you are installing - the problems with AHCI are confusing. Again, you can partition and format the disks by running the Windows 7 installation. How to do it bootable USB flash drive with Windows I described .

Thanks for the Parted Magic program. I downloaded it, but apparently something is wrong in the tables. When you try to create or format a partition, you get the error Input/Otput error during read or during write on dev/sda. They disappear altogether boot sectors HHD and SSD in BIOS. I don't understand what to do. It looks like something is wrong with the GPT and MBR tables. Is there any way to fix the tables? By the way Asus laptop Zenbook UX32A.

• MBR and GPT are not tables, but records at the beginning of the disk. They cannot affect the visibility of drives in the BIOS. As far as I understand, your ultrabook is not supposed to use an SSD on its own, but as a cache for the HDD. I think that the solution to the problem should be sought here. Actually, can this laptop work with an SSD as a separate drive?

Yes, the SSD is intended to be a cache, but I installed the OS on the SSD. And everything worked great. Then I decided to move the user folders to another drive. Moved and... 🙂

• I can’t understand how you managed to transfer a single user to another disk - when copying a profile there must have been a huge number of errors due to file blocking. But most importantly, I cannot understand how even this incorrect action could affect the inability to reinstall the system. There must be something else. M.b. Did you change something in the BIOS?

Well, to transfer a single user, I created a temporary administrator, and after the transfer, I deleted this temporary administrator account. When copying user files, there were a couple of questions, but I skipped them. I don’t understand about the impossibility of reinstalling the system (It’s just that the impossibility of installing a new OS appeared even before I dug into the BIOS. But even after resetting the changes in the BIOS, it’s still the same.

• Yeah. The transfer is now clear, that is, official Account still was. But with a laptop it’s completely unclear. If you manage to solve the problem, and I have no doubt about it, be sure to unsubscribe. Very interesting. Unfortunately, without having a similar sample at hand, it is problematic to give you any practical advice. Sometimes the solution is hidden right under your nose. I remember how we once fought half the night with a server that refused to start after changing the controller. What they didn’t do. Thank God they didn’t kill me for real. But it turned out that by this time they had simply gone crazy and were trying to boot from the wrong device.

I made a bootable Acronis flash drive.
And he gave an error "E000101F4: No found hard drive» . How can this be if the BIOS has this situation:

Boot Opton Priorities


I go to
Hard Drive BBS Priorities
and there:
Boot Option #1
Boot Option #2

• It may very well be so. Acronis can easily not see something. For example, for me it does not see disks connected via USB to a computer with motherboard Intel DX58SO. Previously, something of the same kind always came up. To create backups, I now mainly use Live-CD with .

But I think it’s very useful, so I’m posting it corrected and expanded copy.

The task of transferring the user profiles folder from the system drive to another logical or physical disk in OS Windows family is very important for a number of reasons:

• The need to separate operational information (system) and archival data (user data) due, for example, to the need for storage system files on a high-speed but less reliable RAID0 disk array.
• There is no need for additional information transfer when reinstalling the OS.
• Compared to transferring an individual user profile, transferring the Users folder is more preferable, since the profiles of all subsequent users of the computer will also be saved in the right place, and there will be no need to go through the transfer procedure again.

One of the most elegant and efficient methods for carrying out such a transfer is the ability to determine the location of the user profiles folder during the system installation stage. Microsoft provides us with this opportunity for Windows 7 under the name Audit Mode. You can read more about this mode in the next article.

Now about the actual scenario for transferring the Users folder:

1. You should perform a normal installation of Windows 7 in any way convenient for you, stopping at the step where the installer program will ask you to enter the computer name and user name.
2. At the screen for entering your computer name and username, press CTRL + SHIFT + F3. The computer will restart and boot into Audit Mode. In this case, the system will be in this mode until you run the sysprep utility with the /oobe switch or select the appropriate item in the windowed version of this utility, which starts in Audit Mode every time the system starts.

   

3. Since at this point you will already have Windows 7 installed, but not fully configured, before assigning a new location for the user profiles folder, you must first prepare the disk subsystem, that is, create and format the partition that you plan to use to house the Users folder .
4. Now you need to create a configuration file to configure the location of the Users folder, here are its contents:

   x86 version (download):
   D:\Users D:\ProgramData
   Version for x64 (download):
   D:\Users D:\ProgramData
   Save it under any name, for example unattend.xml.

   Attention! The file must be saved in UTF-8 encoding (and for those who understand UTF8 + BOM).

   

5. The window with the title "System Preparation Program 3.14" must be closed. Otherwise, when you run the following command, you will receive the error: “Another copy of this application is already running.”

   It is better to save the "unattend.xml" file on your hard drive rather than on a flash drive, because when using this file, the next time you reboot, the flash drive will not yet be connected and the system will report an error and will constantly reboot. The entire installation process will have to start over. Assuming that the unattend.xml file has been saved in the root of the C drive, then the command to apply it will be as follows:

   C:\Windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /oobe /reboot /unattend:C:\unattend.xml
   

   

   
   The computer will restart.

   If the file is NOT saved in UTF-8 encoding (as described above), you will receive the following error: “A fatal error occurred while running the Sysprep program on the computer.”

   

6. Returning to the window for setting the computer name and user name, complete the installation.
7. After booting the computer, make sure that the D:\Users and D:\ProgramData folders exist and that the folder of the user whose name you specified at the final installation stage is in D:\Users.

   

As a bonus, you can also take advantage of the so-called advantages of preventing errors associated with explicitly specifying the previous paths of user profile folders. To do this, create two symbolic links using the mklink utility (run with administrator rights):

Mklink /J C:\Users D:\Users mklink /J C:\ProgramData D:\ProgramData
Thus, now, even when accessing the same paths, any program will not notice the substitution and will work with folders on drive C, although in fact they will be located in the location you configured.

To make some applications compatible with Windows XP, I recommend making the following symbolic link:
mklink /J "C:\Documents and Settings" D:\Users
If the users folder already existed and you set the same user name during the initial setup of the operating system, then another folder for the profile will be created, and the old one will remain untouched. All files from the old folder should be transferred to the new one manually (it is advisable to boot under a completely different user so that files in the profile folder are not blocked).

Therefore, I recommend that after installing Windows and after creating user profiles (for this you need to log in interactively once as each user), create a system image on the C: drive. In the event of a failure, you deploy the system from an image in which user profiles are linked to their folders, and the problem described in the paragraph above will not occur.

Good day, one of the first articles I wrote on this site was an article about p. The instructions were written for those who already have an operating system installed, although it is advisable to do this on a freshly installed system, it was still possible to transfer the profile even on a system that had been used for quite a long time. Today we’ll look at another, not very bad solution - transferring the profile at the stage of installing the operating system. All you need to do is install the system as usual, but stop at the user creation screen and then follow the instructions:

1) Press the key combination Shift+F10, a command prompt window will open.

Robocopy "C:\Users" "D:\Users" /E /COPYALL /XJ

Upon successful completion, the console will indicate the end date and time.

3) Delete the old folder and create a symbolic link to link the new folder to the old location (just in case;). To do this, enter two commands one by one:

Rmdir "C:\Users" /S /Q mklink /J "C:\Users" "D:\Users"

The first command is used to delete folders, the second is for .

4) Now enter the command regedit, in order to get into the registry editor.

5) In the window that opens, go to the branch:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

And change the parameter ProfilesDirectory to the path to our profiles folder. I change it to a folder D:\Users.

Close the Registry Editor window.

6) Now let’s restart the computer, to do this, write the following command on the command line:

Shutdown -r -f -t 00

7) After restarting, create a profile, all profile folders will be saved in the location you specified.

Update : Site visitor BoontOff in the comments he suggested a good option. To avoid writing all the commands manually, you can use the file .bat. To do this, create a file users.bat and put it in the root of some drive (but not C, of ​​course). Open it with notepad and copy the following into it:

Robocopy "C:\Users" "d:\Users" /E /COPYALL /XJ rmdir "C:\Users" /S /Q mklink /J "c:\Users" "d:\Users" REG ADD "HKLM\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList" /f /v "ProfilesDirectory" /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d "d:\Users" Shutdown -r -f -t 00

If necessary, change the path “D:\Users” to your own. And now, when executing the instructions, immediately after the first point, just enter the following on the command line:

D:\users.bat

The script will run the sequence of actions specified in this article. It will create and copy the users folder, delete the old folder and create a symbolic link in its place, and also make a change to the registry, then the computer will restart and you can continue installing the system. If you reinstall the system quite often, you can also add a line at the beginning of the file containing the following (adjusted for your path):

Move /Y "d:\Users" "d:\Users_OLD"

After this, the old Users folder will be renamed to Users_OLD.

Thank you for this.bat BoontOff. Ready-made files can be downloaded: and .

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