I'm looking at separating a fresh Windows 7 install such that I can have the OS in the main partition but everything else would be in another partition. How can I reliably make my Windows 7 install use the other partitions for whenever something is installed?
The basic layout would look something like this:
- -main partition(C:), will contain Windows 7 OS and swap paging file this partition will contain enough space to hold this but not much more
- -secondary partitions(D:, E:, F: etc), will hold everything non-OS
critical. This includes all
program files, docs and settings
and everything else that has
nothing to do with the OS itself.
So if my OS gets hosed, ideally I can just perform an image restore on the primary and that's it. One of the main problems is that when a new program is installed, Windows has a habit of putting program dependencies into folders in its own partition. So one of the problems that need to be solve is to point Windows to use the other partitions and force it not to use the primary.