Application 'settings' - where recorded?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Terry Pinnell
  • Start date Start date
T

Terry Pinnell

I'm trying to understand how and where my system records all the many
changes that are made during a typical working session. I have two
boot options, both XP Home. Two days ago I copied from the original
partition C on Disk 0 to partition H on Disk 1. I booted into H and
have been working in it today.

I expected to find that all the changes that had previously been
automatically written to C (mainly within C:\Documents & Settings\)
would now be in H. But in fact they are in BOTH.

Changes to my Mailwasher logs, Firefox bookmarks etc are being
recorded in places like these:
C:\Documents and Settings\Terry Pinnell\Application Data

Changes from Symantec LiveUpdate, ntuser.dat, shortcuts to Recent
Files, etc, are being recorded in places like these:
H:\Documents and Settings\Terry Pinnell\Recent
H:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec

Is that normal? Is it down to each application (or XP program/process)
to decide whether it records in the *currently booted* partition, or
in some 'fixed' place? If so, presumably *both* of these partitions
must be present for that application to work properly in future? So if
I removed one, to get greater simplicity, some applications would be
screwed up?
 
I expected to find that all the changes that had previously been
automatically written to C (mainly within C:\Documents & Settings\)
would now be in H. But in fact they are in BOTH.
Click to expand...

That's not as clearly-worded as it should have been. I'm referring of
course only to all the NEW changes.
 
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