S
Stuart
I'm hoping someone can help me answer this before I waste a week potentially
messing up my system.
I'm currently set up with a dual boot system with the original installation
of XP Home in one partition moved up to the middle of the drive, and a new
installation of XP Home in a second partion, nearer the start of the drive,
which I started building to replace the original install as it was getting a
bit slow and suffering from annoying intermittent errors. However, this
getting a bit corrupted by a complete system freeze means that I want to
start this again, and would like to progress this onto the next level.
I have noticed at the time of setting this up that within 'TweakUI for XP'
that you can setup alternative locations for different system folders, which
I have done successfully with My Documents, and with some success with
Shared Documents, to get these off the boot partition and into a seperate
data partition.
I have also moved my Email folders out to a data partition, so that I can
download and send Email from Outlook in either installation, and have it
store it all in the same place (rather than the default set up of having two
seperate stores on the OS partitions, neither of which is accessible by the
other).
However there are also options in here for Desktop & Programs, and my
question is this.
Can I have several different XP installations in the same system, each with
a core set of applications common to all of them (System utilities, internet
applications etc), but then with a different subset of applications in each
partition (Office suite in one, photo editing in a second one, Games in a
third, a testing system for cover disks etc. in the fourth, & so on), but
have all (or at least the majority) of the applications code in the same
partition?
I realise that I can do this already by installing each application to each
OS partition, but it means that all the application data is stored alongside
the OS, increasing the amount of space I'd need to allocate to each one, and
the amount of space that backups of the OS partitions take up, and it seems
to me that this is an awful lot of duplication. (Okay 2 partitions is not a
lot, but there is the potential for 6 primary partitions on a system with 2
hard drives and an extended partition on each drive).
Also I realise that if this was viable, I'd have to do the application
installs to each of the partitions individually as before, so that each
installation's registry knew about each application I wanted to run on it,
but would it be possible to set the Programs option in TweakUI for XP, to
all point to the same Progam Files directory on a seperate partition within
the Extended partition, so that I only had to maintain one copy of the
application data files in the system, rather than a seperate copy of each
application for each installation of XP?
Or if this is not possible directly, would it be possible, when installing
applications, to set the installation path away from Program Files on the C
drive, and have all the applications put the majority of their data into one
data partition, which would then be accessible from any of the OS
installations in the same way that the My Document folder works from its own
partition?.
I would also like to be able to put My Desktop into a partition seperate
from the main OS partition, but recognise here that I'd either need to have
all of them the same, which would not bother me too much, or have each of
then in its own directory within the desktops partition.
Overall the basic idea is to get as much user data off the OS partitions as
possible, partly for saving space against multiple application
installations, partly to minimise the amount of space that the backup of
each WinXP Home partition would use, and also for occaisions that I did have
to reinstall the OS, I could do so without worrying about User Data.
In fact, another reason for doing this would be so that once the core
application set was established on one partition, I could just copy this
partition to create each of the others, rather than having to do new
installs from scratch, building up the rest of the application sets from
there on an individual partition basis, and then this could more easily be
replaced from a CD backup set than starting a new reinstall from scratch.
The more I think about it, the more I want to try it, but given that porting
the Shared Documents Directory away from the OS partition has not been
entirely successful (it forgets occasionally and reverts to the one on the C
drive (either that or an application or some latent part of the OS is
assuming that this is where it will be and recreating it) and I don't
realise that it has done this until can't find something that should be in
there), I am apprehensive about spending the next week of my time off work
setting it up, only for it not to work, or worse, for it to appear to work,
but then to fall over later, when I would have less time to fix it.
messing up my system.
I'm currently set up with a dual boot system with the original installation
of XP Home in one partition moved up to the middle of the drive, and a new
installation of XP Home in a second partion, nearer the start of the drive,
which I started building to replace the original install as it was getting a
bit slow and suffering from annoying intermittent errors. However, this
getting a bit corrupted by a complete system freeze means that I want to
start this again, and would like to progress this onto the next level.
I have noticed at the time of setting this up that within 'TweakUI for XP'
that you can setup alternative locations for different system folders, which
I have done successfully with My Documents, and with some success with
Shared Documents, to get these off the boot partition and into a seperate
data partition.
I have also moved my Email folders out to a data partition, so that I can
download and send Email from Outlook in either installation, and have it
store it all in the same place (rather than the default set up of having two
seperate stores on the OS partitions, neither of which is accessible by the
other).
However there are also options in here for Desktop & Programs, and my
question is this.
Can I have several different XP installations in the same system, each with
a core set of applications common to all of them (System utilities, internet
applications etc), but then with a different subset of applications in each
partition (Office suite in one, photo editing in a second one, Games in a
third, a testing system for cover disks etc. in the fourth, & so on), but
have all (or at least the majority) of the applications code in the same
partition?
I realise that I can do this already by installing each application to each
OS partition, but it means that all the application data is stored alongside
the OS, increasing the amount of space I'd need to allocate to each one, and
the amount of space that backups of the OS partitions take up, and it seems
to me that this is an awful lot of duplication. (Okay 2 partitions is not a
lot, but there is the potential for 6 primary partitions on a system with 2
hard drives and an extended partition on each drive).
Also I realise that if this was viable, I'd have to do the application
installs to each of the partitions individually as before, so that each
installation's registry knew about each application I wanted to run on it,
but would it be possible to set the Programs option in TweakUI for XP, to
all point to the same Progam Files directory on a seperate partition within
the Extended partition, so that I only had to maintain one copy of the
application data files in the system, rather than a seperate copy of each
application for each installation of XP?
Or if this is not possible directly, would it be possible, when installing
applications, to set the installation path away from Program Files on the C
drive, and have all the applications put the majority of their data into one
data partition, which would then be accessible from any of the OS
installations in the same way that the My Document folder works from its own
partition?.
I would also like to be able to put My Desktop into a partition seperate
from the main OS partition, but recognise here that I'd either need to have
all of them the same, which would not bother me too much, or have each of
then in its own directory within the desktops partition.
Overall the basic idea is to get as much user data off the OS partitions as
possible, partly for saving space against multiple application
installations, partly to minimise the amount of space that the backup of
each WinXP Home partition would use, and also for occaisions that I did have
to reinstall the OS, I could do so without worrying about User Data.
In fact, another reason for doing this would be so that once the core
application set was established on one partition, I could just copy this
partition to create each of the others, rather than having to do new
installs from scratch, building up the rest of the application sets from
there on an individual partition basis, and then this could more easily be
replaced from a CD backup set than starting a new reinstall from scratch.
The more I think about it, the more I want to try it, but given that porting
the Shared Documents Directory away from the OS partition has not been
entirely successful (it forgets occasionally and reverts to the one on the C
drive (either that or an application or some latent part of the OS is
assuming that this is where it will be and recreating it) and I don't
realise that it has done this until can't find something that should be in
there), I am apprehensive about spending the next week of my time off work
setting it up, only for it not to work, or worse, for it to appear to work,
but then to fall over later, when I would have less time to fix it.