My D Drive is my main drive ...How to scan it

[Sharissa]

I have a 3+ year old Dell.  The C drive is 100 gb and the D drive is 1 TB.  That is how it came if I wanted an SSD Drive so it would boot fast.   How do I can CCCleaner to scan my D Drive where all of my Documents, Downloads, Pics and Music reside?

[nukecad]

As you note you can have your Downloads, Documents, Pictures, etc. folders on a different drive than the Windows Operating System.

That's called 'redirecting' those Standard folders and is common practice when you have a small SSD for the OS and a larger drive for storage.

But that isn't a problem for CCleaner and it will scan/clean the right drive without you having to do anything.

To explain a bit more:

Those Standard folders (and others) are stored in the user profile for each user.
That's because each user of that computer has their own set of folders, and they contain different things from any other users of that computer.
If that user profile is not stored on the OS drive then Windows knows that, and will 'point' CCleaner or any other application to where it actually is.

Windows stores paths like that as variables that applications (and users) can access to save time looking for them.
eg. the Windows variable %Userprofile% contains the name of the currently logged in users profile and what drive that profile is saved on.
Within that location %Userprofile%\AppData\ contains all your temporary browser (and other application) data.

So CCleaner (or any other app) just has to say "Look in %Userprofile%\AppData\ " and it finds the current users application data, it doesn't matter what the username is or what drive that user profile is actually on.

As a further example:
%Userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\
Contains your Icon caches, Thumbnail caches, and a couple of logfiles.
It doesn't matter what drive it's on or what your username is, using that variable in the pathname will go straight to it.
(You can try it yourself - Copy and paste it into the pathname bar of File Explorer, press Enter, and you will be taken there whatever disc it is on).

(Note- one exception to all that is if you have manually created your own folders with those names on another drive rather than redirecting Windows to put the standard profile folders there - ie. if you have manually duplicated those folder names outside of your profile - But even that wouldn't be a problem for CCleaner because any application saving data wouldn't use them and would still use the ones in your user profile).

The only times that you have to tell CCleaner to look at a different drive is when using certain of the Tools that work with specific drives (DisK Analyzer, Duplicate Finder, Drive Wiper/Wipe Free Space), or when specifying 'Includes' or 'Excludes' in Custom Clean.

 

[Andavari]

That's if someone uses the re-direction that for example Win10 has built into it, I personally don't use any re-directs and instead just use a shortcut in the normal paths.

As for getting CCleaner to clean a secondary drive it will clean normal things such as the Recycle Bin without any messing around with it. Although for non-system/non-OS drives in order to clean particular files or folders (just make sure you're not configuring it to delete any personal files you wish to keep) by going into: Options > Include
Such as inputting for it to clean a "D:\Temp" folder