Conjunction Junction, what's your function?

The new drives look great. Newegg delivers again. I am intrigued by the VelociRaptor's use of a 2.5" hard drive. I hope that the reduced surface area leads to increased data density and better response times. Time to install.

My first attempt was following the instructions posted by Kari on eightforums.com using the System Preparation Tool answer file. I was already leaning more and more towards the junction option and concerned about having the right offline image source name, but I stumbled even before that. I was either typing the command wrong or had done something really wrong with the syntax. No dice.

My next attempt was using the mklink command to junction the Users folder to the new drive, but I tried it after I had logged in once and got a lot of file permission errors with the XP/Vista compatibility junctions that had been created in the first user's account. I wonder if part of the issue was the copy command just not being up to it. Perhaps I should have used robocopy as Garth Metzger does. His instructions are much simpler. Another write-up can be found on Life Hacker.

Since I hadn't done anything important I decided to reformat and give the junction trick a go again, this time stopping early to Audit Mode as suggested in the system prep tool instructions. Then I did the junction trick instead of messing with the answers file, rebooted and then continued with the Personalize step of the Windows 8 installation.

Now all my User files are really on the HDD. This junction method works much better than rewriting a bunch of Registry keys or setting a default location. Hard coded apps think they are writing to C:\Users. Since the junction is from a folder on one drive to a folder on another drive, there are no strange rules and behavior for drive roots like you get when you assign a mount point to a folder path. It doesn't relocate just some of my data as . I think I could have ignored Kari's warning about ProgramData and done the same.

Now I'm clicking away getting my user accounts setup. I decided to make a Local Account for day-to-day work and a Microsoft Account for testing that feature out later.