My boot drive started to crap out on me ( 80g WD Caviar) - it started making grinding noises and freezing up, so I decided to use my secondary drive (250g Seagate SATA) as my everything drive. I installed windows on the SATA, made it the primary boot drive, and transferred all of my docs over to the SATA. I used WD's utilty to copy all of my Program Files to the new drive in hopes that it would recognize them as programs but it won't. I even went into RegEdit and changed the default Program Files directory to the new drive. It still won't see the files. How can I get the new Windows installation to see the old Program Files that are in the new PF directory? I know someone has come across this before!! Please help!!

I hope this make sense.

~Behemoth

I did a windows backup once of a drive, then installed a it a secondary and the new one as primary, put a new install on the new one. Then i went on the old drive found the backup and made it restore to the new drive. Iduno if that'll work w/ u. i don't do that much cause i got a whole comp for backups.

Quote: Originally Posted by Behemoth My boot drive started to crap out on me ( 80g WD Caviar) - it started making grinding noises and freezing up, so I decided to use my secondary drive (250g Seagate SATA) as my everything drive. I installed windows on the SATA, made it the primary boot drive, and transferred all of my docs over to the SATA. I used WD's utilty to copy all of my Program Files to the new drive in hopes that it would recognize them as programs but it won't. I even went into RegEdit and changed the default Program Files directory to the new drive. It still won't see the files. How can I get the new Windows installation to see the old Program Files that are in the new PF directory? I know someone has come across this before!! Please help!! I hope this make sense. ~Behemoth

It makes perfect sense, but I hate to tell you that the way you tried to restore everything won't work. You have to actaully reinstall the programs from scratch as there are a LOT of deep system links that are created by the installation process that simply copying the files can't duplicate.

It's a mistake that a lot of people make, tho, and being guilty of it myself, all I can do is offer my sympathies for the stress this situation is causing.

D

Quote: Originally Posted by drougnor It makes perfect sense, but I hate to tell you that the way you tried to restore everything won't work. You have to actaully reinstall the programs from scratch as there are a LOT of deep system links that are created by the installation process that simply copying the files can't duplicate. It's a mistake that a lot of people make, tho, and being guilty of it myself, all I can do is offer my sympathies for the stress this situation is causing. D

Thanks for the replies! I thought that might be the case....I was just hoping someone had a solution.Looks like the rest of my weekend is planned out. Thanks.

~Behemoth

If you have not formatted the original drive it may be possible to mirror the first HD onto the secondary.
Thus giving you 2 drives with the exact same partitions.

Then all your files would be in order when you boot from the bigger drive. All that would be left would be to resize that partition or format an additional virtual drive to store all your data on to seperate it from the OS partition.