Redirect your SPECIAL folders to another location

First of all you might be interested in knowing what are special folders, Special folders are those folders used by Windows to store the data related to its users. These folders includes My Documents, My Pictures, and Favorites folders, among many others such as Desktop.

You may want to redirect special folders for a variety of reasons.

The first is to redirect the My Documents folder to a different drive. For example, you may redirect My Documents to drive D so you can reinstall Windows XP on drive C without losing your documents.

The second scenario is when users have a network and want to access their documents from more than one computer. In that case, you can redirect both their My Documents and Favorites folders to a network location so they have access to them from anywhere.


The table shown below displays the special folders that Windows XP creates after an installation and their default paths.

The first column contains each folder's internal name as Windows XP and other programs know it. The second column contains each folder's default path, which almost always starts with %USERPROFILE%, making these folders part of each user's profile folder.

Changing the Special folder's path to another drive's location

Let see how can we do this. Fire up the Registry Editor and find this key "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current

Version\Explorer\User Shell Folders". This is the key where Windows XP stores the location of per-user special folders. Now all you have to do is change the path for the folder that you want to have on some other drive or path.

For Example, if you want the My Documents folder of all the users to be on "E:\All Users\". Simply change the path of the Personal to "E:\All Users\%USERNAME%\My Documents". Now when Windows XP reboots, the document's path for all of the users will be E:\All Users\UserName\My Documents where 'UserName' is the name of the user.