Moving system folders to another drive

[kojack]

I am wanting to move my photos/videos/music/Documents to my 8tb HDD instead of on my C Ssd.  Now, these are tied to onedrive, Do I move them the same way I moved downloads, just make the folder in the 8tb and move the location to that folder?

[Aaron44126]

If you have it set up to sync these with OneDrive, I think that you can just...

• Shut down the OneDrive client.
• Move your entire OneDrive folder to your 8TB HDD.  (C:\Users\(username)\OneDrive)  Don't change the folder name, it still needs to be "OneDrive".
• Start the OneDrive client.  It will complain about the folder being missing.  Tell it that you want to use a custom location and point it to where you moved that folder.

Another way that you can move folders that Windows or applications expect to be in a certain location is:

• Shut down any programs that might be using the folder.
• Move the folder.
• Open an admin command prompt.
• Run the command: MKLINK /D "C:\path\to\old\location" "D:\path\to\new\location"
• This will set up a link so that the folder that has been moved can still be accessed using its old path, even if it is on a different drive.  (Doing this for folders inside of a cloud sync'ed folder might not work out well, though, if the client doesn't handle symlinks properly.  Moving the top-level folder should be OK.)

[kojack]

Awesome, thanks. 

 

I will give that a try and see how it works!  Report back in a couple of days!

[douglas60]

Hello everyone. I have a three drives in raid 0. I have three new drives to replace them. I do not have a storage device large enough for the 1,5tb on the old drive. I do however have a desktop with three empty drive slots. Can i put the new drives in the km-g laptop and the old drives in the z790 and transfer the data between the two?

?  . 

[Aaron44126]

34 minutes ago, douglas60 said:

Hello everyone. I have a three drives in raid 0. I have three new drives to replace them. I do not have a storage device large enough for the 1,5tb on the old drive. I do however have a desktop with three empty drive slots. Can i put the new drives in the km-g laptop and the old drives in the z790 and transfer the data between the two?

?  . 

 

What is the RAID setup that you are using?  Intel Rapid Storage, or ...?  Does your desktop also support it?  You "should" be able to move a RAID array to a different system as long as it supports the same RAID technology.

[douglas60]

My Clevo km-g is supported by IRST. My new z790 Gigabyte elite has a raid driver although I never set up my new system in raid. It's an Intel chipset so it should have IRST support. 

 

[Aaron44126]

28 minutes ago, douglas60 said:

My Clevo km-g is supported by IRST. My new z790 Gigabyte elite has a raid driver although I never set up my new system in raid. It's an Intel chipset so it should have IRST support.

 

You'll want to check the BIOS setup on the desktop and make sure that IRST is activated.  Normally, there will be an option to switch the system between "RAID" mode and "AHCI" or "NVMe" mode (RAID support is disabled in this case).  If IRST is activated, you should see an Intel RAID controller device in Device Manager under "Storage controllers".

 

You can move the drives over and check.  If IRST is working, it should recognize the array without any further configuration and let you get at the files.  (IRST uses metadata stored on the drives themselves to identify the array.)  If the drives show up as unrecognized, as long as you don't try to format them or anything, you can just move them back to the laptop and the array will still be intact.

 

If it doesn't work out, you can get a 2TB desktop hard drive for like $30 and use that as a temporary holding space for the files.