My question
- Is there a program for Windows 7 which can completely move C:/Program Files to D:/Program Files without losing all the registry connections, so ending up with a working D:/Program Files?
Any help would be great
I think the only safe way to do this would be to un-install your applications and then re-install them on the D: drive, although core Windows files will still be written to the C: drive (assuming you have Windows installed to the C: drive)
This probably isn't what you wanted to hear. I'm not aware of a program that would be able to do this for you as it would need to know how each application was put together, what files it accessed and which registry keys or other configuration files it uses.
Some "fixed" Windows folders can be redirected by the system. See this for instructions. I don't think Program Files
is one of them...
But, you could manually force a redirect by moving all the folders and files to their desired location and create a symbolic link from the old location. This means you still have a "fake" ProgFiles
folder in C
, but the files are really stored elsewhere - as a bonus there's no registry messing to do because this will still work as though the fake ProgFiles
is the real one.
Here's a post I found describing how to move all the contents of your User
folder using symlinks, the procedure is effectively the same but just using the ProgFiles
folder instead.
However, moving everything so that you can delete the original ProgFiles
folder to create the linked one will probably be rather difficult - I would imagine this would require booting to a live CD or recovery disk of some type to ensure nothing inside program files is being used.