My Ideal Drive Set Up
May 22nd, 2007 by Baz L
I’m not sure what sort of experience that you guys have had with Windows in the past. But it seems that every few months Windows gets finicky. No matter how many programs I uninstall or stuff I delete it runs slow, crashes, etc. Instead of trying to figure out what the problem is I usually prefer just reinstall Windows. Reinstalling over an existing bad install, of course, isn’t the greatest idea. So as a result, I’ve devised a perfect drive set up.
Small C: Drive (Partition) - Essential Files
My boot drive or partition is usually the smallest on my system. On this drive I have the Windows operating system and my Program Files folder, where all my programs are installed. I don’t see any reason for this to be more than 80 GB. This drive also has the Documents and Settings folder which have your user folder (username or Administrator). This folder contains a bunch of folders with settings, etc. But a few of them are important to my set up:
- My Documents
- Favorites
- Desktop
I’m trying to keep this drive down to just what is essential to Windows and not to my data. The above folders are all about data. If I need to reformat Windows I have to go through so much trouble to back these up before I start. My My Documents folder averages about 4 GB and on my Desktop I also have a Downloads folder, so you guys can only imagine how big that is.
Larger D: Drive (Partition) - All Other Stuff
Even if I do back them up, every time I reinstall Windows I would have to move them back. To avoid all this, this is what I’ve done. I go into the user folder in Documents and Settings, then I simply click on the those folders, cut them and paste them in a folder on my other drive/partition. They get moved, but the reference to them also gets moved. So the next time Windows looks for your My Documents folder, it’s going to search on the D: drive instead of the C:. With this set up you can freely format your C: Drive whenever you want. Well at least with a minimum of fuss.
To recap, you can format you C: drive when you reinstall Windows and not have to lose files in your My Documents, Desktop, Favorites folders. With this set up I’m essentially restricting a drive to just storing only Windows files and Program Files as much as possible. Therefore when I format this drive, I’m only concerned about restoring Programs and not have to be worried about my data, because I know it’s safe where I left it.
Reinstall a Clean Windows Setup
Now although I have the perfect drive setup, before I reinstall Windows there is a little bit of footwork I need to do. Back in the day, programs stored a lot of their settings in the registry. Although this is still true, to a certain extent, there has been a general shift. There is a folder in the Documents and Settings user folder called Application Data. This is great news to my setup. Although, you can change the location of this folder, I haven’t. I don’t really see the need to, yet. So, I always have to copy just this folder before I reinstall. It’s usually under 200 MB so, it doesn’t take long. You might want to change it if you can’t log into Windows, but that’s a totally different problem.
Restoring Settings
One problem we have when we reinstall Windows is that it will default everything back to where it was originally. After all, it’s a fresh install. There are a few ways to counter this. Before your reinstall, you can load up regedit and back up the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders. This is the key that stores the locations of all this good stuff. So you back this up before your reinstall, keep it in a safe place, and double click it after you’re done and everything is great after that.
I use a varied method. After one of my clean installs, I went through all of this and moved data, settings, etc, etc. I installed my basic programs: FileZilla, 7Zip, Nero, Notepad++ and a few others. After this I used Nero to burn a HD Image onto a DVD (well about 3 CDs back in the day). So I don’t need to go into the reinstalling Windows phase and look for CD keys, then have to worry about reinstalling basic software. Since my data is on a separate partition the size of my backup is kept to a minimum. So every few months, I pop in this Restore disk and after about an hour of unattended restoring, I have a brand new, clean, speedy system with all my settings and drivers installed. Everything is ready to use.
And that’s how I’m set up.
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