Movement of installed programs

[Ron Lowe]

Hi all,

Is there a way to relocate installed programs, intact, from one drive to
another? I have XP and other programs installed on C: but now it's not big
enough. I bought a bigger hard disk and want to move everything from C: to
this new disk, without having to re-install again. Can I do this?

 

[Guest]

Practically NO. The best way is to uninstall your 3rd party apps from
the C drive and reinstall them on D drive. When you install apps it also
installs files in many other places on your harddrive including the Registry.
Do not uninstall or delete any system files from C drive for that is also
your boot drive. Photos, documents and music files can be copy&paste
from one drive to the other using Windows Explorer. Also the type of
"bigger harddisk" you got makes a difference. Is it internally installed
or is it an external USB drive? You cannot boot from an external USB drive.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Is there a way to relocate installed programs, intact, from one drive
to another? I have XP and other programs installed on C: but now it's
not big enough. I bought a bigger hard disk and want to move
everything from C: to this new disk, without having to re-install
again. Can I do this?

Because installed programs have many pointers to them, in the registry and
elsewhere, you can generally not do this (except for a very occasional tiny
self-contained program).

There is software that purports to search out all these references and
change them for you, such as COA.exe. I've tried such programs in the past
and found them to be considerably less than perfect. I don't recommend
trying this; the best thing to do is to unintsall, then reinstall the
programs from their original media.

 

[Anna]

Hi all,

Is there a way to relocate installed programs, intact, from one drive to
another? I have XP and other programs installed on C: but now it's not big
enough. I bought a bigger hard disk and want to move everything from C: to
this new disk, without having to re-install again. Can I do this?

Ron:
Perhaps what you should consider is using a disk imaging program such as
Acronis True Image (there are others) that will "clone" the contents of your
current HD to another new HD. Understand that if you use such a program,
your new HD would be, in effect, a duplicate of your current HD, including
the OS, all programs & applications, your created data - in short,
*everything* that's currently on your present HD. Is that's what you want to
do, then a disk imaging program should be a consideration.
Anna

 

[Patrick Keenan]

Hi all,

Is there a way to relocate installed programs, intact, from one drive to
another? I have XP and other programs installed on C: but now it's not big
enough. I bought a bigger hard disk and want to move everything from C: to
this new disk, without having to re-install again. Can I do this?

The only reasonable way to do this is to clone the original drive to the new
larger drive, then install the new drive as C. If you don't have cloning
software, get the trial version of Acronis True Image (www.acronis.com)
which will work for 15 days, plenty of time to do what you want. If you
know what you're doing, this task can take under an hour. Pay attention to
drive jumper settings.

There is no reasonable way to simply move programs from one location to
another. It's not just an issue of file locations, it's an issue of
registry references, and there is no way to know what they are, how many
there will be or where they are.

HTH
-pk