How can I easily add a new hard drive as my boot drive?

Question

I just bought a SSD to use as my boot drive. However, I don't really want to re-install all my different applications by hand.

Is there a way I can tweak the registry or something to simply "point" to where existing applications are?

The new drive is only 60 GB as opposed to a 200 GB partition on my old disk, so I can't just clone the whole thing either :-\

Answer 1

Is there a way I can tweak the registry or something to simply "point" to where existing applications are?

No, most all programs these days must be re-installed because of all the registry settings for the software. Some programs run right from the programs folder, but most do not, the ones that run right from the programs folder without registry support can simply be copied and pasted to the new programs folder, not too may programs work this way anymore though.

Answer 2

How much room are you taking up on the 200 GB drive? For instance, could you do a file backup (as opposed to an image) to the new drive?

Answer 3

It is possible to change registry settings, but you don't want to, as there are literally thousands of references and it would be very easy to break something. It would be faster to manually re-install the applications.

You could use NTBackup to backup the HDD and System State (registry, etc), re-install Windows on the new SSD and then restore the backup. Presuming of course that the backup is less than 60GB.

There are some imaging applications that can restore to a smaller partition, HDClone for example.