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Mount second hard drive as C:\Users using DISKPART?

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Saturday, November 28, 2015 5:04 AM | 1 vote

Is this supported and/or documented anywhere for Windows 10? I want to mount my second hard drive as C:\Users as a NTFS mount, without using junctions, so that I save space on my primary SSD drive for Windows, programs, etc.  Instructions to do so will use ASSIGN MOUNT=C:\Users at some point in the instructions, potentially upon installation or post-install.

All replies (7)

Friday, December 4, 2015 9:30 AM ✅Answered

Hi Brain,

If so, the Mount-point folder paths are available only on empty folders on basic or dynamic NTFS volumes.

More information, please read this guide:

Assign a mount point folder path to a drive

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753321.aspx

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Monday, November 30, 2015 6:43 AM | 1 vote

Hi Brian,

Yes, you could move or relocated the entire Users folder to another drive. However, it's not recommend you do that. Since it might cause the complex issue when you do upgrade.

The detailed information, please read this article:

Users Folder - Change Location in Windows 10

http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1964-users-folder-move-location-windows-10-a.html

Please Note: Since the website is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help, and unmark the answers if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Support, contact tnmff@microsoft.com.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015 2:45 PM | 1 vote

That's not quite what I'm looking for but I appreciate the link.  I don't want to mount my HDD as a D: drive, I want to mount it within the C:\Users directory structure which is allowed by NTFS.  The post you provided looks like it's more based on registry and sysprep settings.

I have a 250GB SSD and 1TB HDD.  So after my desired state Windows would see a C: drive with 1.25GB of space, where the physical location of the C: is on the SSD except for C:\Users which is on the HDD.  The D: would be absent or mounted to a different device.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016 3:00 PM

So are you saying that this is possible? That I could mount an empty hard drive as C:\Users?  I know how to do this, my question really is whether this is supported by Microsoft.  It has to be or at least needs to be for power users or enterprise users that don't want to store user-related data on the same drive as the OS.

Friday, December 29, 2017 9:35 AM

Have you found a solution to this @brian? The proposed solutions in this thread doesn't really answer the question. I guess I would try to boot on a usb and move all files to the device before changing the mount points. Never done it on Win though. 

Sunday, March 18, 2018 12:42 PM

Well, actually is quite simple if you have a brand new Pc and you're installing from the scratch: https://superuser.com/a/154846

Basically you start your normal process, then when you reboot you choose the repair option, you open a command line then:

1) backup the current Users directory (that is almost empty though)

C:
move Users Users.bak
mkdir Users

2) run DISKPART

DISKPART
DISKPART> list
DISKPART> select disk 1
DISKPART> create partition primary
DISKPART> list volume
DISKPART> select volume 3
DISKPART> format fs=ntfs quick
DISKPART> exit

Please note that you may have to use different values when you select the disk and the partition!

  1. Assign the partition and robocopy from the backup
assign mount=C:\Users
robocopy /mir /xj c:\Users.bak c:\Users

4) Now you can close the shell and reboot the PC. The installation process will pick up and voilà your big disk is mounted as C:\Users on your smaller SSD.

Thursday, May 2, 2019 6:30 PM

I agree with Johan Ostling that the original question was not answered. Brian's question was not on the mechanics of mounting a volume in a directory. It was is this process supported specifically for the C:\users directory, which is a special directory to Windows. It may be that Windows doesn't see treat this directory any different, but that was not explicitly stated. For users that are interested in doing this, we want to know that we won't run into problem down the line while doing an update or something else.

The process proposed by ema.v is intended to get to the desired result although I am not sure it is complete. It seems to perform the operations while Windows is up and running. I have seen other proposals that boot first with a repair disk so that Windows will not be running on the main drive while the manipulations take place.

This type of mapping is very common with Linux and during the installation you can choose the mount points for various volumes if you want. If all the mounting in Windows takes place before the operating systems starts running then Windows may not care. But still, are there any known problems that can occur with this scenario?