Seperate OS and Documents

Hi,

I'm looking for the easist and safeist way to seperate the Win7 OS from My documents (and music, pictures etc).
I've been using win7 for a few months and on the whole I really like it, but I would feel a lot better if I could seperate out all my documents+data from the operating system. I know its a fairly simple operation to switch the location for Documents, music et all but this seems to me to be a half measure solution as all the User data stays put and makes things (for me at least) more confusing.
I've seen a few solutions scattered around but I am a bit wary about having to mess about with regedit and am concerned about what would happen if I have to reinstall windows.

Any ideas?

Tell us a little about your set-up. ie any extra hard drives or partitions you have. If you don't have another partition, you'll have to create one. (not difficult).

Welcome to the forum!

My harddrive is pretty big. I had it set up with seperate partitions when I bought my new pc (moved from XP to win7) because I thought it would be pretty straightfowrward to do this. When I found out it wasn't, well I kind of left it as it is. But now, the space I had saved for the OS is filling up quickly and I need to move my docs to one of my other partitions.
Because I'm the only user, and I'm starting to get very irritated by the 'libraries' feature, I'm thinking it might be easier just remove libraires (if thats possible..?) and just manage my folders manually. The Libraries just seem to confuse the whole issue for me...

Hi daskkr! Welcome to the Windows 7 Forums website!

Click this link to find out how to move the various folders you want to store on a separate partition.

Store Your Data on a Separate Partition


It a quick handy little tutorial and the process is quite painless and no registry modifications.

I hope this helps.

Have a look at this:

Change location of My Documents Folder

Can you post a screen shot of your "Computer" window like this. (tile view)

Holy smokes, someone linked to my little site.

My tutorial should work for most of his needs, but he also mentioned application data... I assume he wants to put his entire "C:\Users" directory on a separate partition?

I've been thinking of doing that myself (I really wish the Windows installer would give the option the way that Linux distributions do with the \home directory), I can't think of a way to do it... I mean, we could delete "Users" then create a symbolic link in its place (ie. mklink /d <path to new location> C:\Users)... but I don't know if Windows would play nicely while the Users directory was missing.