How to Configure Dual Hard Drives?

Hi All,

I'm sure someone will let me know if I should've posted this noob question in another forum or can direct me to another thread or link if this question has been asked before (I did do a search and didn't come up with anything relevant or that I can easily understand).

I just purchased an HP HDX notebook running Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit and it has two hard drives. The C: drive is labelled OS and the D: drive is labelled DATA which logically is how I want to use the two drives i.e. C: for the os and programs and D: for data. Of course, after I transferred all the files and settings from my old computer which only had a single drive, everything is now in the C: drive of the new notebook. Do I now simply just move the Users folder which contains all of the data folders and files to the D: drive? My concern is whether all of the program links will now point to the D: drive. I think it's got to be more complicated than that. Perhaps there's a utility in Windows that can do this properly? Thanks for your help!

 

Well....you can't simply move the folders for various programs into the D: drive nor can you actually move the Documents folder and various things like that.

Your programs have registry entries pointing to the C: drive and the OS will not go to the D: drive to look for various user things.

Generally, for programs you have to reinstall them and set the install location to your data drive or go into the registry yourself and change any mentions of the program location.

As for the Users thing, I vaguely recall an option to change where you want to set it as so a Google search will probably help you with that.

Personally, my C: drive has my OS installation and any utility installations like Microsoft Office, and various benchmarking tool.

My data drive has all of my games installed onto it as well as my iTunes folder and any media that I have.

 

Thanks, TevashSzat! I didn't think it could be that simple. I'm not about to touch the registry so I'll do what you're doing and use the two drives for different types of programs. I'll be doing some video editing stuff so that would be a good candidate to put the editing programs and videos on the D drive.