Changing Windows User Profile Folder

If you are using a computer for a living like me, the chance is, you might someday want to move your user folder to a different drive. I know I did. and there are ways on the internet and none of that can really satisfy me until I look into Microsoft Document and Also Here the documents gave me an idea on how can I achive this.

However, there it comes with some catch, you have to re-login, or at most reinstall your windows to make it permanent. As for me what I did was I changed a value in Regedit and specify it to the location I want. After I reinstall my windows with the “Reset” function that comes with windows 11/10. Doing this I had set my user profile to the correct path from the beginning of the Windows installation.

so… for example I want to move my UserProfile folder to “d:\Users” (Originally %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Users or C:\Users)

What I did was

  1. goto Regedit
  2. goto Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
  3. change the value in Key name ProfileDirectory from %SystemDrive%\Users to D:\Users
  4. Now you can restart your machine and create a new user
  5. But in somecase it doesn’t work, I reinstalled my windowes using the reset function from Windows 10/11
    • Chose Delete All Files (You better have a backup of your documents)
    • To make it permanent I found that select “Cloud Download” will make your configuration permanent
    • But select Local reinstall will reset all to default settings
  6. You system will install with your user profile folders in the location you specify.

I hope my technique would be help for those who are looking for a way to implement this method.

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