When moving a special folder: Music, Pictures, Downloads, Documents…etc. to a different drive using the Location tab in the Property sheet, make sure you mention the complete target path where you want to relocate the folder to. For example, to move the Pictures folder of your user profile to D:\Pictures, type D:\Pictures, instead of just D:\. This is because Windows does not automatically append the word Pictures. In case you don’t mention the complete path, the shell folder will be moved to the root drive.

Although this may not affect functionality of the shell folder, problems will occur when you restore the folder to its default location in future. When you use the Restore Default button in the Property sheet of the special folder, Windows tries to move all the files, folders and sub-folders present in the root drive (D:\) to your user profile (%userprofile%).

Fig 2: Entire contents in D:\ drive being moved to %Userprofile%\Pictures.

Also the move operation will abruptly fail in the middle, when it tries to open and enumerate the System Volume Information and the $Recycle.Bin folders in the D:\ drive and ends up in Access is Denied error.

Restore a Shell folder to its original location

If you’ve inadvertently moved a special folder to the drive’s root and want to restore back to the original location, don’t use the Restore Default button. You’ll have to edit the registry and fix the shell folder path manually. The shell folder paths are stored in this registry location:

For more information, see Method 2: Using Registry Editor in this article for the default shell folder registry values. To reset the shell folder paths for Music/Documents/Pictures/Videos folders, you may use the REG file reset_music_pictures_docs_path.reg in this article.

Note: After updating the shell folder path in the registry, terminate and restart explorer.exe process, or logoff and login back for the change to take effect.

When moving a shell folder to a different drive, make sure you don’t accidentally move it to the root! Although this article is written for Windows Vista, the advice holds good for Windows XP as well.

Copyright © 2008 Ramesh Srinivasan. All rights reserved.