changing the location of the "shared documents" folder

[rolf]

i want the "shared documents" folder to be kept on my D:
drive and not my C: drive. How do I change this??

 

[Thorsten Matzner]

i want the "shared documents" folder to be kept on my D:
drive and not my C: drive. How do I change this??

This is the C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\ALL USERS\SHARED DOCUMENTS
folder. Try moving it with the Windows Explorer.

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

That won't work in this case, although many user shell folders respond
to right-click moves in Windows Explorer. You need to change the
registry key in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Us
er Shell Folders for Common Documents and in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Sh
ell Folders for other folders that are inside the current Common
Documents folder.

Then cut/paste the contents from one location to the other. You have to
logoff/logon to see the changes.

See my article "How To Move the Shell Folders"
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_shell_folders.htm
for details on all the user shell folders.

 

[Ingvar Kreft]

So if I want to move "C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS" and all folders in that
folder.
My first step is to create a new folder "D:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS".
Then I can move the folder "All users", "USER1", "USER2"

What will happend if I just move the folder "C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS" to
my D disk.
will XP still change in the registry?

/Ingo

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

No. You can't move Documents and Settings after XP is installed. We were
talking about the Shared Documents (C:\Documents and Settings\All
Users\Documents) User Shell Folder. That has nothing to do with the
location of D&S and you can't infer anything about moving D&S from what
I said.

If you move D&S to D:, you won't be able to logon to any accounts. XP
might not even boot.

 

[fenny]

Shared Documents - My Documents

I have two computers on a home network. One is XP Pro and the other XP Home.

Essentialy, what I want to do is to have access to, at least, ALL of the folders, with edit-move-etc rights, on the Home from the XP. If it were possible, I would like to be able to absolutely control the Home from the Pro - install, uninstall, etc.

With XP Pro, as I understand it, I can disable Simple File Sharing and use the other approach - forgot the name for the moment (ACL?) - and set it to share any or all files and folders with copy, move, edit etc "rights". With XP Home I can get the same result but I would have to (laboriously) set each and every folder to "share" - only Simple Sharing is available.

But the "Shared Documets" folder in XP (Home and Pro) provides the edit, copy etc rights for all files and folders which are copied/moved to the "Shared Documents" folder.

I have both computers partitioned somewhat "elaborately" - separate partitions for the OS, documents, temp files (Temp, TIF, History, etc), backups, paging, etc. Essentially, I am trying to keep the C: drives as clean as possible - at one time I even had Program Files in a separate directory. I am not sure if this has bought me anything - just a holdover from my WIN95 days - I started playing around with the partitions and haven't quit even though the Home and the XP are faster and I have a good defrag program.

On each, I have a partition desgnated as the "My Documents" folder, i.e., the registry entry for Personal is E:\ (NOT E:\Personal or whatever the default was - I dont' recall)

After reading the above posts regarding the Shared Documents folder, it seems that redirecting the Shared Documents folder to another location is pretty straitforward (I have seen, elsewhere some discussion about the permissions set up for Shared Documents and this made me wonder if it were dangerous to play with the location).

So here is my "brilliant" idea to achieve my objective of having "total" access to the file and folders on Home from Pro:

What if I move (registry edit) the Shared Folders on Home as:
Common Documents = E:\ (NOT E:\Documents)

Now I would have both Common Documents and Personal pointing to E:\, and then "share" both, then I would have full move-edit-etc rights on Home from Pro.

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Am I asking for trouble here or might this work?
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I finally got around to installing a disk imaging program and could image C:\ on the Home and give it a shot but being a cautious type - if I goof one the imaging process (since I'm new at it) and I goof it up then I've go to reload the Home (an HP with lots of garbage which I always come back and clean out) in addition to all the apps - I thought I'd ask. Also, this is the only place I found a direct answer to the "move Shared Documents" question after a modicum of searching.

Thanks for considering this.