Can I move an installed application to another drive?

Read the article that everyone's commenting on.
Subscribe to the RSS Feed for comments on this article.

There are no comments on this article yet.

Regarding moving programs from one drive to another, PowerQuest release a utility with their Partition Magic software which happily transports all but the most recalcitrant program installs to another drive quite successfully.
I did for a while use a separate drive for installing programs, it only requires a single item to be changed in the registry, and works without problem, but then the normal windows accessories that install with windows start to get screwed up as they try to move themselves to the new location and wind up split between the two, I therefore saw no advantage to it and went back to the standard location.
The Documents and settings is a different kettle of fish altogether! It really isn't worth the hassle of trying to move the whole thing, but the My Documents folder with all it's subfolders can be moved anywhere you want simply by right click, drag and select Move to. If you have more than one Documents folder in XP or whatever, you do have to put each one into a named folder to keep them separate. It does make good sense I think to keep data files well away from potential dangers, likewise does it also make sense to keep such dangers well away from Windows! We must all be aware of the perennial problem where you need to repair or re-install windows every few months because it has started getting flaky. Well, it's actually a relatively easy fix as I have proved over a number of years, the average age of a windows installation without major repairs can easily be three years or more. A separate data drive (logical is fine), a separate logical drive of 5Gb or so for the windows swap file

If your drives are both formatted NTFS, Windows XP (and presumably 2000 too) allows you to mount the second drive onto an empty folder, Unix-style--i.e. when you access C:\Mounted Drive, you're really accessing D:\. This functionality is available through the Logical Disk Manager--just right-click on the volume you want to mount and select "Change Drive Letters and Paths" (or something like that). There's also a set of command-line tools discussed in .

Taking advantage of this is a bit tricky. I would probably do the following for a system with only one (large) user account:

0. Make a complete backup! This procedure is completely untested!
1. Boot into Safe Mode and log in as a different administrator account than the one you want to use. (Make sure it's an Administrator, of course!)
2. Rename the folder that houses your primary user profile to, say, Temp.
3. Create an empty folder with the same name the folder you just renamed had.
4. Use the Disk Manager to mount the new volume onto the empty folder.
5. Move the contents of your profile into the now-mounted folder.
6. Reboot and try it out.

If you have multiple large profiles, I'm not sure what you should do; one option is using the linkd.exe command-line tool to create junction points for each My Documents folder that pop out on the new drive. (A junction point is very similar to a Unix symbolic link.)

(Oh, and if you test the procedure above and it works, let me know--I may be getting a new hard drive as a present this year. ;^) )

Oops, the link disappeared--it was supposed to be http://support.microsoft.com/kb/205524 .

There is one program I know of , and it works although there are some programs it doesn't work on so read it's faq. It is called "application mover"
It really helped me.

quite the contrary, I have found an excellent application that makes moving applications from one location to another, including registry entries and shortcuts, does, in fact, exist. http://www.iolo.com.
Granted this process takes a long time depending on the size of your harddrive from which you're moving the application because iolo's application scans the whole drive for registry entries, the application to be moved and shortcuts. Ultimately, it works and the wait is shorter than reinstalling.

How can i move the folder "documents and settings" to a another drive (D)?

In general you cannot. (There may be hacks, but I don't trust them not to impact the system in other ways.)

The general solution is to examine the application you're using and seeing if you can tell it to use some other directory as its default data directory.

I have Documents and Settings on a second drive- I wish I could remember exactly how I did it, but in terms of moving it, I seem to remember that it was a no go, however you can set it up that way during the install process. I do remember doing something along the lines of installing normally on C:, then adding an unattend file to drive D: (I think you can use a floppy for this), reinstalling windows using the unattend which specifies the location of documents and settings. I'm about to reformat my whole system and once I get this working again that way I'll report back here on exactly how I did it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q236621/

As they say in the classics: "RTFM"...

get Tweak UI (free, part of the microsoft powertoys). you can specify anything youi want to be your my documents, my music, etc. along with a host of other little tweaks

To post a comment on "Can I move an installed application to another drive?", please return to that article's main page.