Redirect docs and settings somewhere else
One of your IT problems is ensuring that it has enough free space on its system partition to be happy. Microsoft is no help since its default installation places directories such as Documents and Settings, Program Files, and Inetpub on the monolithic C: volume. Presumably they do this to make things simpler for users. A single volume is the most efficient allocation of disk, but when your disk does fill up, the consequences are much more serious. This page provides instructions on how to move non-OS directories to other volumes so that you can more easily avoid filling up your system partition.
Windows throws a fit when its system partition nears capacity; it's prudent to use a separate partition for application installations and user data. Here's how I move these directories under Windows manually.
This technique makes use of NTFS junctions, which are a bit like cross-linked files you may have encountered back in the day with DOS... only junctions are cross-linked on purpose! This is also similar to UNIX soft links in that you are creating a second access path to a single directory. Because Windows takes locks on some files in the Program Files and user profile directory trees, we need to use safe mode and two different administrative accounts to pull this off. Safe mode lets us work with Program Files. The logged-on-user can't manipulate its own files, but you can use two different admin accounts to copy the whole user profiles directory in two passes.
You may also want to check what Microsoft recommends for this matter. You could even go user based.
You could just do a search and replace in the registry to avoid the junctions and also create a GPO but I'd come back with that later on as we'll need to create .adm file for this purpose, but this is less error-prone and frees you from worrying about whether an installer will insist on going to your C: drive.
- Install the linkd utility from the Windows 2000 Pro Resource Kit (It isn't available with the no-cost download of W2K resource kit tools, but I'll bet the linkd provided with the no-cost download Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools is the same thing anyway). Alternatively, try Junction from Sysinternals.
- Make sure you have at least two local users with membership in the local Administrators group. You will need to be able to login as both of these users. For clarity, I'll call these admin1 and admin2, but you can pick whatever names you like.
- Make sure that you've logged in at least once as each of these users. This will ensure that Windows has created a profile for them. Determine the path to each administrator's profile. You need to know the directory names under C:\Documents and Settings\ that correspond to each account. If you fail to create a profile before you continue with this procedure, Windows will create the profile while you're in command-prompt-only-safemode. In that case, it does something a little different and the result will be that it will create a new profile for the user if you try to login after this procedure. That wouldn't be a disaster, but you would probably want to clean up the abandoned profile and the new/permanent profile would have a funny name like "numbertwo.copland" if your computer is named copland. I'll assume that these directories are called C:\Documents and Settings\admin1 and C:\Documents and Settings\admin2 so that I can refer to them easily later.
- Boot into safe mode, command prompt only. Login with an administrative account (admin1).
- C:\>xcopy /s /e /h /r /k /o /x "Program Files" "D:\Program Files"
- C:\>xcopy /s /e /h /r /k /o /x "Documents and Settings" "D:\Documents and Settings" ? this will result in an error message about file sharing or locking or so.
- ctrl-alt-del to access the security menu and log out.
- login as the other administrator (admin2)
- C:\>xcopy /s /e /h /r /k /o /x /c /y "Documents and Settings" "D:\Documents and Settings"
- C:\>rd /s "Program Files"
- C:\>"D:\Program Files\Resource Pro Kit\linkd.exe" "Program Files" "D:\Program Files"
- C:\>rd /s "Documents and Settings" ? this will produce an error about file sharing or locking or so.
- C:\>cd "Documents and Settings"
- C:\Documents and Settings>linkd "admin1" "D:\Documents and Settings\admin1"
- ctrl-alt-del to access the security menu and logout
- login as admin1
- C:\>rd /s "Documents and Settings"
- C:\>linkd "Documents and Settings" "D:\Documents and Settings"
- ctrl-alt-del to access the security menu and restart into Windows.
KitKatNeko