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I've got a bunch of programs on an old HDD, which I cloned to a new HDD, however had to reinstall due to issues with the currently installed drivers.

Thing is, now, is it possible to copy all the programs from the original drive, WITHOUT cloning the entire install, to the new drive? This means copying all the registry entries for those programs as well. I'm not willing to pay for a program to do this.

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In theory this may be possible by dumping the HKLM\Software\<appname> key from the old registry and merging it into the new registry. If the paths are the same (e.g. C:\Program Files\<appname>) then there is a possibility that Windows won't BSOD immediately and the application will run normally. My gut tells me that this possibility is vanishingly small, though. This assumes that the application in question doesn't ever store keys outside of HKLM\Software\<appname> or modify the values of other application's keys, etc. – Amazed Jan 15 at 0:53
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Plus you have no idea where programs store their data, since they can choose to store the data where every they want. For example, I hate it when programs decide to store their settings under My Documents, but nothing is forcing them to do otherwise, only it is suggested that they store their data under %localappdata%. – surfasb Jan 15 at 9:12
some programs even do both... – Walter Maier-Murdnelch Jan 15 at 23:11
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As far as I know there is no way to safely copy over the whole Program files folders and corrosponding registry entries as well as user files stored in the user directory. I did a quick search on google and everything I found was recommendations on reinstalling the software because of broken registry entries.

Because you said that cloning is not possible, you should reinstall all programs, this is just the cleanest way to do it.

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