How to use D Hard drive

[diny13601]

It has taken me days to figure this out but I did.

I have a small SSD drive for my C drive on my new laptop and a large SATA for my D drive. I wanted to install new apps to my D drive because I would quickly run out of space on my C drive. Now, everything except Adobe Reader has installed on my D drive.

First, I would like to tell you that all of this is a software issue. So, I know that Adobe automatically installs to C drive. No matter what you do, it will install to the C drive. I will try to contact Adobe about this.

Second, with the advent of SSD drives, Microsoft has not yet really given a good way to install apps to the D drive. Along with Microsoft, computer manufacturers do not set up computers to install to D drive. In fact, when I contacted HP two days after receiving my new laptop, I was told that for $49 I could have their software people make a "best effort" to assist me in setting up my D drive for apps installation. I searched the HP Community and found that HP's advisors stated to delete photos, etc. to free up disk space on C. Bad answers.

Since I am a geek, I researched then took it upon myself to set up my D drive for application installations. As I stated, you can't do this with Adobe Reader.

To make it easier on you, below is what you should do. This will still take a bit of work but I am giving you all of the info about how to do this.

Type Disk Management into your Windows search bar. Click on D>Choose drive tools at top>Disk Management. First, you need to initialize the D disk. In Disk Management, right-click D and then click Initialize Disk.

Choose GPT - make sure that you are not making D a MBR disk.

Next, format D. Choose NTFS. Many tech sites will tell you to use FAT32. Don't do it. I figured this out because my C drive was NTFS.

If you aren't comfortable with Disk Management, There are two really good free programs you can use to initialize, format, partition your D drive then clone you Windows system to the D drive. You want to clone it because if you don't, your apps will seek Windows system files on your D drive. If they aren't there, you will receive errors. The two apps are Active Partition Manager which helps you manage storage devices and the logical drives or partitions that they contain and Macrium Reflect 7 Free - Home version works well - use this to clone Windows from C to D drive.

After you have initialized, formatted, and partitioned your D drive, you want to tell Windows to install your programs on the D drive. There are two things that you need to do.

First, go to Settings>System>Storage>Change where new content is saved>Change all of them to D>apply. If you only do this without changing the registry entries, the apps will still not install to D.

So, second, you need to change your registry. Use regedit, the registry editor. Go to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
Change all below from C:\ to D:\. Just double click on each one or right click each one and choose modify. Then, type D:\ where they say C:\ (everywhere the programs are directed to C:\).

CommonFilesDir
CommonFilesDir (x86)
CommonW6432Dir
ProgramFilesDir
ProgramFilesDir (x86)
Program@6432Dir

Then, use Macrium Reflect 7 to clone Windows from C to D.

That's it. Now most of your apps will install to the D drive.

Of course, you can buy a large SSD for very little money but you will still have to backup Windows then install it to the new drive.