I’m running low on HD space where I keep my windows 10 installation which won’t let me update, so I want to move installed programs to another harddrive to free up space.
I know I can uninstall & re-install, but am looking for another, faster way to transfer programs. Googling I see there are a few options, one being the program “Steam mover”. While initially made to move games, apparently it works with any program as long as you move from NTFS to NTFS formatted drives.
Does anyone here have experiences with it, does it work? Audio programs frequently install needed files into multiple places besides the main installation folder. Will Steam Mover take into account these dependent locations? Any tips on this are welcome.
I should have installed programs into the other drive from the beginning to prevent this mess
You could clean install Windows on another hard drive and run the programs you want from there, it could work.I have Manjaro on another drive and Win 10 in the other and with wine i run games and audio programs from the windows partition ,not everything works because of wine but in your case you will be running windows programs from a windows partition so in theory everything will work fine.That way you wont need to transfer anything give it a go
As far as I know it’s not possible to move installed programs from one drive to another, at least not on Windows systems. Maybe on Mac. If you’ve found a program which allegedly can do this, try it on your own risk. I can’t tell you anything about it, but I can tell you that there’s a program which can change the size of your partitions. It’s called “Partition Wizard” and you can get it for free right here. If you’ve got some space left on your drive you can enlarge your partition by using the Partition Wizard (works fine) and there you go.
I think moving windows partition is actaully possible with a lot of tools at least. Then, AFAIK, also the programs should continue to run. Some copyprotections might base its user key on the harddrive serial or size or port or so. Then you would have to re-register it. Also keep in mind that you might have to unregister then plugins first on your old partition,e.g. vps avenger.
Thanks for the suggestions, words on possibilities. I think I’ll play it save and simply move stuff (for example freeware vst(i)) that doesn’t have hooks in to many different folders, then run the windows update and see what I can copy back from the moved files. Too much of a n00b here to be messing with partitions or re-installing windows to another harddrive, possibly messing everything up.
I’ve just moved 130 GB of Native Instruments data files to another drive, they have made that part easy so if you have any heavy NI instruments have a look at that.
I recently cloned a drive using Macrium Reflect which is free - you can then drop the cloned drive in and everything just works. Perhaps see if it could help?
You can move everything which is not installed, for example .dll files. But make sure that your files aren’t on drive C when you’re updating Windows, otherwise it’s likely that everything’s lost. On the other hand I’ve heard rumors that it’s possible now to “upgrade” Windows without losing your data, for example if you want to switch from Win7 to Win10. But I wouldn’t rely on that for sure.
I’m a noob myself and I could do it in 5 minutes, it’s self-explanatory.
It’s very useful, makes everything much easier and can save a lot of time.
