How do I reestablish shortcuts after changing my boot drive?

[QuaZulu]

I'm taking the opportunity of upgrading my 128GB SSD while I update my computer to Win10. The old SSD was my boot, C:, and OS drive. Shortcuts on my desktop, including on my Start Menu (Win7), pointed to files and programs installed on my much larger drives. I hope to upgrade to a 500GB M.2 drive for the boot drive and yet to still use the older, larger drives for programs and storage.

If / when I get that system running is there a way to reestablish / rebuild the shortcuts on the clean Win10 desktop and Start Menu so they point to programs already installed on other drives?

 

[gbhall]

Conversion to Win 10 should also convert all the paths, confg files, data files etc to become part of the Win 10 main disk. It might sometimes be possible to redefine the desktop shortcuts to point to the original installation now on D: etc, but it is rarely as simple as that.

You could try editing the shortcut properties to change references to C:\.... into D:\... but that will very rarely be all that you need to change. The software will usually have entries in the registry, references to other utility software which is part of Windows itself, and, well, reinstalling the app is most times the only way to move an application.

On top of that, you would still have a complete copy of the original app that was working on C: but now under control of Win 10. The full process of doing what you want is to backup the data of a previous application, uninstall it, including all registry entries (that depends on the quality of the vendor's uninstall process - not always very good), and delete any data. Then reinstall the app, taking the advanced option and choosing to install on D:\ hoping that the original data in that place will not be over-written by the new installation, or copying over that backup data if it is lost.