-=PCTechTalk=- Re: Moving your My Documents folder

Don,
    Have I told you how much I love you lately?          lol

    Excellent questions, my friend!  Yes, Windows is prone to the dreaded 
"Drive letter confusion" when system folders such as the My Documents folder 
is concerned.  However, all that would happen is that Windows will create a 
new empty My Documents folder on whatever drive takes over the letter where 
MyDocs is supposed to be.  Your actual documents (or whatever else you 
choose to store under the MyDocs umbrella) will remain perfectly safe and 
will be readily accessable as soon as you Shut Down, fix the problem and 
boot back up.  You'll just have an empty MyDocs forder on a different drive 
that will now be ignored (until you inadvertantly repeat the same problem, 
of course).  Feel free to delete the empty MyDocs ONLY after fixing the 
problem (you don't want to delete the empty folder when Windows thinks it's 
the right one).         lol

    As for sharing the system folders and files on an external drive moved 
across two or more systems:

1.    Be sure to set up both systems as completely as possible before 
tackling this part.  The idea is to ensure that all of the included systems 
are stable & that all drive tinkering (creating, moving, resizing, copying, 
etc. partitions) has been completed.  Only then should you set out to create 
this external beast.

2.    Focus on only one system folder or file at a time.  In other words, 
Move the MyDocs folder to the External using your primary system first. 
Then, Shut Down, move the external to your next system and boot that one up. 
Only after all booting activity has ceased, go into the 3nd system's MyDocs 
and manually copy anything you find in there.  If there are some dupes with 
the one on the external (that came from your main system), keep the most 
recent (or whatever criteria make sense to you for that particular file). 
Repeat for all file and subfolders in there and simply delete the remaining 
"My Documents\desktop.ini" file.  Once the entire 2nd system's MyDocs folder 
is completely empty, Move that folder to the exact same location as the one 
already on the External.  Now, repeat that process for any other systems you 
want to use the external.  The MyDocs folder is not affected by different 
versions of Windows, so it won't matter if one of your systems is using 
WinME, another has 2000 and 3 more are running XP (2 Home and 1 Pro).  They 
will all recognize that you have moved the folder and will adjust their 
respective registries with the new location (however, this is not true when 
it comes to most system folders &/or files.  ask whenever you have any 
doubts).  Only after you have taken care of ALL of your systems MyDocs 
folders should you move onto another folder or file you wish to share among 
the systems.  I know it's a lot more work moving the drive back & forth, but 
it'll cut down on the chance of missing steps or forgetting to do it for all 
of your movable 'toys'.

3.    Items that are commonly shared like this include, but are not limited 
to, My Documents, Outlook Express' DBX Store folder, Google Desktop search 
index folder (a huge, normally hidden folder that contains all of the 
indexing info), Saved games, Multimedia collections (if stored separate from 
the MyDocs area), your Downloads folder (where you organize and store apps, 
updates, patches, drivers, etc. that you have downloaded over the years) and 
almost anything else that makes sense to you.

4.    Items that should NEVER be shared in this way include, but are not 
limited to, Program Files, Documents & Settings, the Swapfile, Application 
Data, Temporary Internet Files folder and most anything that resides inside 
the Windows folder.  This statement remains true even if the systems sharing 
the data are the same exact version of Windows.

Peace,
GMan

"The only dumb questions are the ones that are never asked!"

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Don Wilcox" <dwilcox3@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pctechtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 7:26 PM
Subject: -=PCTechTalk=- Re: Moving your My Documents folder


> WOW.  Couldn't get any easier than that, so I'll try to make it more
> difficult instead. :-))
>
> Placing My Documents (and the mail store and page file) on an external 
> drive
> requires the drive be plugged in, turned on and connected to the computer
> being booted up.
>
> Is there a risk of drive letter confusion?  Examples:   With one or more
> flash drives connected the external drive might be drive H:, but take them
> out and it might become Drive F:  On the Desktop the configuration might
> make the external Drive X: and on the Laptop Drive G:.
>
> In my case the drive will move between my desktop and my laptop.  I don't
> expect to implement these changes until after I am happy with the Pro
> install and get rid of XP Home so there will be no question of moving
> between Home and Pro on the desktop.
>
> Don 


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