4

I have got two partitions on a PC running Windows XP:
C: system partition
D: data partition

Usually every user has got his user profile on

C:\Documents and Settings\<user>

But I have moved the user profiles to the D: partition and linked them to the old locations using the junction tool from sysinternals: 

D:\<user>
junction "D:\<user>" "C:\Documents and Settings\<user>"

Everything works great, but the only annoying thing is the Recycle Bin:
When a user deletes a file (which physically is located somewhere in D:\user), the file is moved to the Recycle Bin on the C: drive, which actually makes sense because Windows still thinks that it is somewhere in "C:\Documents and Settings\user". But this means that deleting files can take very long time.
So how can I tell Windows to use the Recycler on the D: partition instead?

I hope that you can understand the problem.

Duc
  • 41
  • 1

2 Answers2

0

I had a similar problem (on Win10): SSD system drive, HDD data drive, junctions worked, deleting to the recycle bin was no problem, but restoring stuff from the recycle bin resulted in a copy operation when deletion was triggered from inside the symlinked path (e.g. C:\Users\me\junction-to-d\foo).

This problem can be circumvented by going into the Disk Management Console, removing the drive letter (D:\) and adding a mount point (e.g. C:\data). Just adding a mount point is not enough, the partition is not allowed to have a drive letter at all.

Why this happens: The recycle bin view has a column Original Location and also knows where the file is really located (drive letter). If the drive letter and Original Location are different (e.g. because a file was deleted from inside a symlink/junction), the restore operation will perform a copy operation. If a partition is only accessed via a mount point on the system drive, there is no conflict and the usual quick restore is performed.

TL;DR: Completely abandoning D:\ for C:\d-drive solves the problem and has the additional benefit of making Windows slightly more Unix-y by not having to switch drive letters in the console and such.

Edit: And that's why we can't have nice things... no file indexing support for anything without a drive letter. Indexing across a mount point in windows

T Nierath
  • 517
  • 4
  • 11
0

Moving the Recycle Bin is not possible.

Plus there are some unfavorable consequences to performance to moving the Recycling bin to another drive.

surfasb
  • 22,452
  • 5
  • 52
  • 77