I figure I may as well tell this story.
I do weird things with my filesystems. I had C:\Program Files\Common Files\ mounted to a separate partition at one point.
I accidentally my hard drive, by getting upset at my Internet connection and slamming my laptop on my desk. I ended up running everything off an Ubuntu Live CD with Virtualbox and a Windows XP ISO I had. I had a 1 TB external HDD, so I saved everything on that, but I was limited to using 4 GB FAT partitions on my XP VM, for reasons I can’t remember, so I had to get creative. All the large directories were mounted to separate VHDs on the external drive. I had tons of Adobe stuff with some other random things in my Common Files folder, so it took up almost a whole disk of it’s own.
And that’s what my life was like the little while I lived in Oregon. Back when I had zero munnies for a new HDD. And wasn’t quite crazy enough to try to use the external as an internal. And had no USB boot.