Moving installed programs to a different partition

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Refwhett

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Does anyone know of a program that can move my installed programs to a different partition and keep those programs working?
I want to do that so that if I ever need to reinstall XP (and of course I will) I won't have to also reinstall all the other programs as well.

thx
Michael
 
Hmmmm?

If I'm understanding this correctly,
Partion magic an older ver had a utility called "magic mover"
that could keep your registry settings straight.

Though I believe after moving lets say "ProgramFiles"
to drive D:\ or even a partion on same drive a OS, that if you reinstalled windows, you would no longer have the same registery.
Maybe look into acronis true image or Norton ghost for solid backups.
G'Luck
 
I've tried many solutions and or programs that are supposed to do this, all had one problem or another...
You're best bet is between now and then research setting up partitions; decide how you want you're system set up and when the time comes do a clean install of XP and your programs.
It's the long way but it also works without a hitch.
The radified site has an excellent guide to partition strategies.

patio. :cool:
 
I have never seen this work. My suggestion is to reinstall them to that partition, and keep the installation files just in case you need to do it again :p
 
Ok thanks people. I was afraid those would be the answers I'd get. I understand that it can¨t be easy to move the programs around and keep the registry straight.
I have read a bit about partitioning strategies which is why I feel I want to do this.
I Suppose I'll take the long way and reinstall both xp and all the other software and start clean. I see a few boring hours ahead of me..... :zzz:

Thanks
Michael
 
Refwhett said:
Does anyone know of a program that can move my installed programs to a different partition and keep those programs working?
I want to do that so that if I ever need to reinstall XP (and of course I will) I won't have to also reinstall all the other programs as well.

thx
Michael

Just a note ; Understand that putting your Apps on another partition is good.Although your Data will stay intact ,you will not be able to re-install Windows and have your apps work automatically. You will need to have a Backup that can rebuild your existing registry.You can use a "System State" backup which will return user setting and app connections or Drive images.
 
Moving applications

Indeed there are plenty of packages designed to do this job. Few can do a perfect job, but most work fairly well. PC Magazine issued a free one some time ago, and you may be able to track it dowm. It was called Change of Address, and came as COA32.ZIP which might turn up in a web search.

The principle is that you manually copy the application to another partition/drive, then coa32 searches your registry and .ini files for the old address, changing it to the new. It works quite well. What is not always simple is that sometimes packages save their address as a 'long name' and sometimes as a 'short name' (i.e. a DOS formatted 8-character version). Sometimes both at once. Other people - Norton and Microsoft are notorious for this - scatter their packages all over the place, in so-called shared directories, in C:/system and /system32, and replacing other people's versions of the same utility DLL's. Getting all this gathered together can be a nightmare, which is why these packages have limited success.

You will generally do best to uninstall a package then re-install it somewhere else. Then of course you need to re-apply any personalisation, vendor patches etc etc.

Then finally, if you need to rebuild your OS, you STILL have trouble getting the registry back as it was - backup or not.

The simple answer is - dont bother. Aquire and USE a damned good backup package instead.
 
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