How to Move the Program Files and User Folders in Windows 7 to a Different Drive
It can be useful for preservation of disk space on netbooks or to speedup disk hungry applications like photoshop, to move them to another drive. This tutorial will show you how to edit the registry to achieve this goal.
WARNING, This tutorial involves editing the registry. This is for experienced users only. Always make a backup and a system restore point before changing the registry
- First copy the folders from your system drive to when you want them to be. You may need to be in safe mode
- Open the start menu and type regedit in to the search box, then open regedit
- Navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
- Edit ProgramFilesDir and CommonFilesDir as needed
- Navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
- Again you need to edit the paths as needed
- Reboot your computer to take effect and you can then remove your old folders.
Let me know if this helped you! Leave a comment.
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2 Comments (Newest on top)
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Skink says: awesome. been looking for it.
thx -
Rodrigo says: Hi!
I’ve been loking a solution for migrating app files and user files and yours seems so be te most clean and order way to do it, i’ll try it this week! Thansk so much.-Other sites like thisone has solved it, but in a more complex way (thru my eyes at least). But.. with your method, can you later run system upgrades an so on? or theres a problem with this too (other methos has this problems)
Bye and thanks in advance.-
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