Can I move "Program Files" installed to "C:" over to new partition "D:"?

...and have them all work?


I've already moved all of my photos, music, videos & other "static" data files to a third partition.

I have nearly 20GB of program files, and I would like to move them over to a new partition, "D:", and have them all still work, of course.
Some are simple .exe freewares & open source programs and will work no matter where they are relocated, but some are installed directly to C: to interact with XP, like Microsoft Office 2003, for example.

I do have enough space on the data partition (the one with the photos & crap) to either make a copy of, or relocate the whole Program Files directory temporarily if any shuffling around is necessary.

I'm sure this must be able to be done, but I suspect it's a lot more complicated than it sounds, because some programs probably have dozens of file paths that refer to the old location that were named during installation.


-The object of all this is to slim down the partition that my OS is on so that my backup partition can be kept small.

Thanks, mate.

Well all that really told me was that I have to buy a yearly subscription to PC Magazine.com in order to download a particular software that will do it.

TweakUI only moves the Start Menu progarm files folder.

Yeah, but it's all or nothing with me.
-And many of those programs are borrowed from friends & family, and I've already had to ask to borrow them all back a few times.

Looks like I can get "Application Mover" for $15. It apparently does just want I want.
I guess I'll have to explore some more options.

With special thanks to odious m, I've completed my task.
....mostly.

I recently installed a new Seagate 120 GB hdd.

I also installed "Norton Premier", which includes "Ghost" and "GoBack".

I installed "Partition Magic 8.0" (Pre Norton edition).

I installed "Change Of Address" ("COA2").

I had 17GB of program files and 30GB of data files (photos, videos, audios, text), all on one partition, C:.

I created partition E:, and moved all my data crap to it.
That freed up space to create partition D:, where I copied my "Program Files" over from partition C:.
I had to keep my "C:\Program Files" intact while I remapped everything in the system that pointed to it to now point to "D:\", using "COA2". (The programs float free in D:. No "Program Files" folder houses them within that partition.)

Once everything was remapped, I deleted "Program Files" from partition C:.
Some of the space that was freed up was divided up among the partitions once again so that C: now has 13+ GB, and D: & E: each have 49+ (50)GB.

----------------My big mistake:
-Not uninstalling all of my Norton crap before I started. Ghost and GoBack made a complete mess of everything, and I had to reinstall it all. But uninstalling it all before I could reinstall it was the real nightmare. It took several tries and a lot of manual excision.

Two problems so far-
Partition C:, where XP resides, is still creating the "Program Files" folder upon restart. The contents are:
-Microsoft Works - Contains 15 .dlls and folder "1033", which contains 2 more .dlls.
-Microsoft Visual Studio -contains folder-within a folder thing, and ultimately just 2 .dlls.
-Microsoft ActiveSync -same kind of thing.
-Common Files -contains folders named "Designer", "Microsoft Shared", and "System", which all contain either .dlls, or folders that contain more .dlls.
I don't get a warning when I delete the whole "Program Files" folder from C:. But it regenerates itself when I reboot.
Really it's just an annoyance.

-Anyone have any ideas on what's going on? Maybe I need to dump the dlls from my prefetch folder in system32? Or, they may all pertain to Office 2003. Maybe I need to just reinstall that. (?)

Second problem is that Explorer.exe seems extremely buggy now. (Can't imagine why! )
I know I've really run it through the ringer, but does any one possibility stand out most as to why it's misbehaving? It hates to be restarted via the taskbar. It will sometimes hang so badly that I can only press the on/off button to restart the computer. It does things like when I try to click out of an open file to close it, the image remains on the screen. If I right click & hit properties anywhere on the image of the open folder, I get the desktop properties, as if the image wasn't even there.

I had been having problems before all this where Explorer would shut down & restart when I was in the middle of transferring large amounts of data from one location to another (on the same partition).
It was just a minor annoyance at that point. Now it feels like I broke it. :P

I've always run a decent size (2GB) virtual memory reserve, and I have 2GB of RAM.

Anyway, I feel like I'm 98% to right where I want my system to be.
I just need help with these bugs.

I do have a clone of everything as it was before this undertaking, BTW. Anybody thinking of trying something like this should know that just one wrong move & it's all over. So be sure to have it backed up!

I used TweakUI to change the Program Files' location, for what that's worth. I've read that all it really does is point new apps to install at the new location. I haven't actually tried that yet, though.

I'm pretty convinced that the .dlls in my C:\Program Files folder that keeps regenerating at bootup are all to do with my Office 2003 installation.
regular "all the time use" dlls are kept right in the sytem32 folder, I think, and then most-often-used-program dlls are copied & kept in the prefetch folder.

In other words, I think I might be able to completely irradicate the C:\Program Files folder. It may regen for some other reason somewhere down the line, and it's really fine if it does, but I'm trying to better understand it's relationship to the rest of the system on C:.
-For example, are programs installed to "C:\Program Files" going to load faster than those installed to "D:\"?

An issue with my explorer.exe was a desktop "froofy" program called "Vital Desktop". It's just an unnecessary extra that spans a panoramic screensaver.
I disabled that at startup, and now I have resolved the issue of explorer.exe not removing the open folder page images when I "X" them out.
But it's still a little "sticky" with some things.
Finding that program to be the cause of some of Explorer's problem seems promising to me in that maybe I simply have something else to hunt down & kill to have explorer behave happy & snappy again.

Getting there.

Well it looks like I've done it.
I've played with partitioning before many times, but only during initial installation of Win2kPro. I've never done any rearranging like this while trying to keep data perfectly intact, so this is an accoplishment for me.

Explorer is working great now. I believe that my problem was the combination of a default setting in the Norton Utilities that sets the HDD to defrag during System Idle, and Norton GoBack taking forever to tag all the files on my HDD.

I uninstalled & reinstalled Microsoft Office 2003, and it created C:\Program Files again, so that's that, I guess. It doesn't matter.

I also had to put Norton components back in, and everything installed as if the default program location is D:.

So I had everything set up like this:
C: = 13+GB, (System)
D: = 50-GB, (Programs)
E: = 50-GB, (Data)

I created the back-up partition, "H:", using space from C:.
First I disabled Norton GoBack. (Partition Magic can't create a partition with it enabled.) I disabled the Virtual Memory in XP, and then I defragged C:.

Defragging before backup software is enabled is a good idea because it appears that the back-up software writes a bunch of contiguous, imoveable files to the partition, which it will do where ever it can find the space it needs. The same with the Virtual memory in XP, though I did that more for ensuring I could get enough free space from C: to create the Back-up Partition, H:.

I created the back-up H: nearly splitting C: in half. I then defragged C:...again, (-which now goes quickly, BTW), and enabled GoBack.
I used Ghost to create my first backup image of C: on partition H:.

So now...
C = 7.75 GB (System)
D = 49.3 GB (Programs)
E = 49.3 GB (Data)
F = PCMCIA Slot CF card adapter (my camera card)
G = DVD-RW
H = 5.37 GB (Backup)

The Norton gobackio bin, some 8GB in size, can actually be put anywhere you choose upon initial installation. You can also choose the size. I chose just to keep it in same folder as the program on drive D:. This way the backup partition doesn't need to be so large.
While it's true that as long as the bin is not on the same partition as the operating system, it won't be lost in a catastrophic system failure, the location of the restoration image files get put right in the directory with Windows!
This is a bit like throwing the key inside the safe-box!
When my system puked a few months ago, my Norton restore points folder disappeared along with "system32", rendering GoBack the biggest waste of money on software I had ever spent!

Now that I have Ghost installed along with a dedicated backup partition, and set it up to update itself however often I see fit, I'm kinda scratching my head & wondering WTH I need GoBack for in the first place!

I'll stop babbling on about it now, but I welcome any comments or suggestions.
-And thanks for everyone's help.

If I do anything more partition work, it will be to create a tiny bootable Dell diagnostics partition.