Reinstall Windows 11 after relocating Users Folder

Hi All,

I had installed Windows 10 when I had last purchased it and had relocated the Users folder using this tutorial on the Windows 10 Forum - Move Users Folder Location in Windows 10.

This was then upgraded to Windows 11 through updates.

I now plan to reinstall Windows 11 again. How do I reinstall in the same way keeping the existing Users folder in the D: ?

I attempted to perform a reset to avoid a reinstall but Windows does not let me stating that the Users folder is not on C:.

Hi vrushankd
Run the tutorials again. This is what I have to do, relocate the user folders after a fresh install. It doesn’t take long in my opinion. Windows will always use the default locations, one of the reasons is because it want’s to force you to backup with OnerDrive, apart from being the fact that the default locations have always been… the default locations.

I am not sure that there is another way.

Be sure to use the Windows 11 tutorials, there may be subtle differences to those in the Ten forums..
I am not certain that you really need to look at each tutorial, I believe one is the same as the other less the folder name. But here are most of them anyway:








P.S.
There has been the occasion (seems random) where I have had to disable OneDrive first, because it locks the user folder to OneDrive. But it’s only happened to me a couple of times. There are tutorials for disabling OneDrive in the Tutorials section.

vrushankd said:

I now plan to reinstall Windows 11 again. How do I reinstall in the same way keeping the existing Users folder in the D: ?

I attempted to perform a reset to avoid a reinstall but Windows does not let me stating that the Users folder is not on C:.

Click to expand...

Are you unwilling to ignore the Users folder entirely and simply save files to somewhere else on D? Or even C?

D:\data or C:\data for instance.

As far as I know, there is nothing sacred about C:\Users.

Fishmill said:

Are you unwilling to ignore the Users folder entirely and simply save files to somewhere else on D? Or even C?

D:\data or C:\data for instance.

As far as I know, there is nothing sacred about C:\Users.

Click to expand...

Did you read his post correctly?
vrushankd has already moved the user folders to an external drive, now vrushankd wants to reinstall Windows and wants to know if there is a way to avoid having to relocate the folders in Windows settings again. At least that is how I understand it.

If doing a repair install i.e. installing Windows 11 over itself then the existing user folders are preserved.

If you clean install using a MS account, the default location for desktop, documentss, pictures, and videos will automatically default to Onedrive. Before you can move the default location of your user folders, you will have to first turn off Onedrive folder backup syncing and unlink your account and the PC from Onedrive. If you clean install with a local account you will not run into this issue.

antspants said:

Did you read his post correctly?
vrushankd has already moved the user folders to an external drive, now vrushankd wants to reinstall Windows and wants to know if there is a way to avoid having to relocate the folders in Windows settings again. At least that is how I understand it.

Click to expand...

Yes. You understood correctly. I do not want to rename / backup / copy again.

So it seems, there is no way to do it through a clean install then? What about the reset option? Anyway to bypass the error prompt ?

Steve C said:

If doing a repair install i.e. installing Windows 11 over itself then the existing user folders are preserved.

Click to expand...

Recent updates have botched many things so am planning to do a fresh start.

vrushankd said:

Recent updates have botched many things so am planning to do a fresh start.

Click to expand...

No matter what road you take, it is best taken after making an image of your current install.