Do not move Special Folders in Windows to root

Users can move the special folders from their default location to another folder or drive in Windows XP and Windows Vista. Special folders are for example the pictures and music folders in My documents. Their directory can be changed using the Location tab in the Property menu. It is recommended to add the full path as the location when moving those folders. If you want to move the Downloads special folder to drive the downloads folder on drive e: you should enter the full path which is e:\downloads in this case.

The reason why this is important is that Windows does not automatically append the folder name to the path. This means that if you enter e: as the path Windows Vista will assume that this is the path to the download folder. The problem arises when a user tries to change the location again because Windows will move all files on that partition to the new location. Think of it, if e: is the special folder then all contents on that drive have to be moved.

This process will not complete because of System Volume Information and $Recycle.Bin which cannot be moved. The only way to fix this is to change the path of those folders manually in the Registry.

The location of all special folders is stored in the Registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ User Shell Folders

Just change the value of the special folders that you have changed to the root folder and restart the computer afterwards so that the changes take effect.