scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> >  Even if a 100 TB disk was free, I am still not eager to reinstall 
> > Windows.

> At some point though (if not already) you are going to have spent more time 
> trying to fix these things than it would have taken to just reinstall. 
> Didn't you spend ages trying to defrag this drive a while ago too?  If it 
> was me I'd just bite the bullet and reinstall before I wasted any more time 
> on such issues.

  The defragmentation wasn't essential. I was just wondering how I could
defragment that partition completely because it seemed to be so difficult.

  As for "biting the bullet", if it ain't broken, don't fix it.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] npgcablecom> wrote:
> Older versions of Windows, prior to XP, you could do it, since a) 
> settings didn't get saved into c:\documents and settings\, and neither 
> did documents. I don't think there is any *obvious* way to move 
> settings, and if you did, you would break things that assume they will 
> be in the same place, instead of checking the current path for it, and 
> while you can move the documents, **I know** personally that this breaks 
> some applications which expect the document path to remain the same, 
> after detecting they are in XP or higher.

  If Windows supported soft links, then it wouldn't be a problem.

  (Yes, Darren, I know NTFS supports soft links. However, Windows XP doesn't,
no matter how much you claim it does.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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scott wrote:
> Such an application that assumes absolute folder paths that are hard 
> coded would be ridiculous. 

You know what's ridiculous? The multimedia libraries for the box I'm working 
for cross-compile, and then explicitly use sed to put the full path to the 
libraries into the object code of the libraries, meaning you have to compile 
them in the same path as you run them, even tho those are, by definition of 
the libraries, not even the same machine.

Ridiculously lazy, I call it.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Warp wrote:
>   (Yes, Darren, I know NTFS supports soft links. However, Windows XP doesn't,
> no matter how much you claim it does.)

It does for directories. It just doesn't have soft links to individual 
files. :-)

And that just supports my contention that the only good reason for soft 
links is to fix broken programs that shouldn't have been hard-coding 
addresses to start with.

(Actually, the one other common use, making libxyz.2.8.so point to libxyz.so 
is a pretty good one, since that would seem to be a lot of mechanism in the 
loader you can easily bypass with soft links, hard links, or copying the 
files, each of which has its own problems.)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> >   (Yes, Darren, I know NTFS supports soft links. However, Windows XP doesn't,
> > no matter how much you claim it does.)

> It does for directories.

  I can't find any way of creating such a soft link in Windows XP. If I could,
I would have used that solution a long time ago.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
>>>   (Yes, Darren, I know NTFS supports soft links. However, Windows XP doesn't,
>>> no matter how much you claim it does.)
> 
>> It does for directories.
> 
>   I can't find any way of creating such a soft link in Windows XP. If I could,
> I would have used that solution a long time ago.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx

If you don't like sysinternals, you can use MS's tool:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/205524

It helps if you know Windows calls the "junctions".

You might want to be aware of the caveats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point
They act more like hard links than soft links in some ways.


Hope that helps! :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx

> If you don't like sysinternals, you can use MS's tool:
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/205524

  I suppose I could try that. The only remaining question is whether one
really can move the "Documents and Settings" directory to another partition
and replace the original with such a soft link. The directory in question
is probably always in use when Windows is running, so how to do it? Perhaps
it isn't in use when booting to safe mode?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> The directory in question
> is probably always in use when Windows is running,

Only if you're logged in as that user.

Oh, you want to move the entire documents-and-settings, and not just the 
individual user directory inside? Hmmm. You could always boot a livecd to do 
it. I guess if you want to move the "all users" thing, you'd have more 
trouble than moving just yourself.

If you want to change it when you install, just do this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q236621

If you want to move just your personal home directory, you can find a 
registry key called "ProfileList" that will list each user and the full path 
to their home directory. It works to move that after install. Log in as 
administrator, copy everything to the new place (which is easier in XP than 
Vista :-), change that in the registry, and reboot. You should wind up 
opening the new location when you go to your documents and such. I haven't 
found any program at all that disrespects *this* setting, altho some will 
use (for example) "My Documents" under your profile even if you put "My 
Documents" somewhere else in XP.

I'd still say getting a bigger disk is likely as easy. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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scott wrote:
>> while you can move the documents, **I know** personally that this 
>> breaks some applications which expect the document path to remain the 
>> same, after detecting they are in XP or higher.
> 
> Such an application that assumes absolute folder paths that are hard 
> coded would be ridiculous.  It would mean for instance it would only 
> work on English 32bit XP and nothing else.  German XP (and I suspect all 
> other languages) has different folder names for My Documents, 64bit has 
> a "Program Files (x86)" folder, Vista has C:\Users rather than 
> C:\Documents and Settings, didn't Win2K have C:\WINNT as the windows 
> folder or something? Basically such a program would suck so much, the 
> fact that it stored it's data on C rather than D would be the least of 
> your worries.
> 
> BTW Vista can trick older/badly written programs in to thinking they are 
> writing to a certain location, but actually stores the files in the 
> correct area.  If you tell Vista your user area is somewhere else (eg D 
> drive) then really everything will be put on the D drive, even by badly 
> behaved programs that try to write directly to the C drive.
> 
> 
Uh. Think you misunderstand. At least one did, more or less, this:

1. Install.
2. First start up - ask OS where 'My Documents', or local equivalent is.
3. Create folders for here for the documents, then store this location.
4. I change the location in OS (And.. you would think if you had this 
option they would include an "move related documents to new location", 
option...).
5. Program breaks, since its *looking* for what was created in #3, 
rather than asking the OS if the path to 'My Documents' is the *same* as 
it was when it installed originally.

This is far more likely to be common than for my copy of XP to suddenly 
morph into 64 bit, or German. lol

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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scott wrote:
> BTW Vista can trick older/badly written programs in to thinking they are 
> writing to a certain location, but actually stores the files in the 
> correct area.  If you tell Vista your user area is somewhere else (eg D 
> drive) then really everything will be put on the D drive, even by badly 
> behaved programs that try to write directly to the C drive.
> 
Oh, and just to be clear, who the frack wants Vista? lol

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models, 
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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