DescentBB

How would I move my program installations from one hdd to the other? (I'm thinking, just the registry).

I have a number of games and progies physically on my C: drive, but installed on my E: drive. I want to move them over to C, but don't know how.

Also reinstalling just isn't an option as some are huge (4-6 gigs) and others i've lost the install files or can't get them back.

There's also some programs that are installed and are located on E, and it'd be nice if i could move those over to C: as well.

Any ideas?

cloning or ghosting those installations is about the only thing i can think of

There are programs out there for migrating your programs.

Drive Mapper in Partition Magic will do this. Haven't used it but it takes everything that has E in it, and then converts it to C in the registry. Then you just move your files over to C I think.

Just a thought.
Norton Utilities WinDoctor is able to 'repair' drive letter errors. That might do what you want. Of course, make a back up before you try anything.

Merlin, partition magic seems to be made by both PowerQuest and Norton. (Google found PQ, and Newegg has Norton).

Any thoughts?

If they're still installed in your current registry, you just need to go in and use a registry replacing utility (if not free, there should be fully functional trials) to replace "e:\program files" with "c:\program files", or some other smart combo that will only replace what you need and not what you don't want.

If they're still installed *somewhere*, i.e. you still have a registry hive from maybe an old Windows installation, then it's a matter of importing the hives using regedit into an arbitarily named key. The "software" hive (named "software" in your c:\windows\system32\config) folder is likely what you'll want to import. Once imported, I'd export it to a .reg file and sift through it with notepad, getting rid of junk you don't need, and then finally using notepad's replace function to modify the registry paths so that when you import it it doesn't go back to where it came from but rather instead so that it lines up properly into your current registry. Of course, sometimes even this method isn't complete, and you'll need other keys, but it's a good start.

I've done this before, so it's certainly possible, but not always worth the effort.

PowerQuest was bought by Symantec a year or two ago. Symantec owns Norton.

I have 2 versions of xp installed, so I want the other version to recognize the programs so I don't need to reinstall everything.
Is that doable?

It is but it is horribly ill-advised to do so, because if a program changes an item in the registry on one copy of Windows, it won't be changed in the other. This can be anwhere from annoying to fatal.

I don't see this being much of an issue as i'm going to nuke the 2nd copy of windows after everything's moved over.

I'm just sort of trying to "move windows" from 1 drive to the other w/ reinstalling as little as possible since i have so much.

It's still highly recommended that you reinstall everything. If your motivation for moving Windows to another drive was purely HDD space, then you should have just copied the entire contents of the smaller drive over to the bigger one using a boot disk, then swapped the two drives (in terms of master/slave settings). If there was something wrong with your Windows installation, you would need to extract from the registry only the keys and values that pertain to the programs you're copying over, and you'd be lucky if you got all of them and they had no dependencies on the old Windows's registry. Otherwise, you're just inviting the instability you were trying to avoid by re-installing Windows.

I don't have a lot on my smaller drive, but the problem is that all the programs are installed to the version of windows that is on the smaller drive.
So I'm pretty stuck.

And I didn't reinstall windows, nor was it for instability.
I just want to free up this partition on my smaller drive so I can play with Linux.

Well, is there data you want to keep on the larger drive?

Yes, the larger drive has all my games and fun programs.

Well you're pretty much stuck. Your safest course of action is to back up all your stuff onto CD and formatting the drives.

bleh...
Most stuff isn't a big deal, but (no lie) re-installing FFXI will be a 5-7 hour event.
Pretty much the whole reason I was hoping I wouldn't need to reinstall it..

What about the move files & settings utility that's on the xp disk?

It copys My Documents and some other generic user settings, not program installations.

It seemed to copy everything, the file is pretty damned huge.

When it was running i saw it copying my games files over, it said it did the desktop, as well as themes.

Hopefully it works.