New CPU and Mobo: reformatting

[McRhea]

Hey all,

Just want to make sure I'm on the right track with my reasoning:

Heres the situation:
I'm upgrading my CPU/Mobo/Ram from an AMD build to an Intel build.
The OS is on its own partition (Windows XP). All my major programs are installed on separate drives/partitions...

So before I wipe my OS partition... I should manually uninstall each of the programs that are installed on separate drives/partitions, correct? This is because the registry will be wiped clean, and the new install of Windows won't realize that there are programs installed on different drives.. am I right so far? Is there anyway around this?

For reference, the main programs I'm talking about are Valve's "Steam" (which holds all my games in its own partition, 90 gigs bought through steam), all my other stand alone games that are not linked to Steam (another 90-100 gigs), and the various other little programs: itunes, VLC, Firefox, benchmarking software, Picasa (Googles image viewer), etc.

Is there anyway to just reformat the OS and then have it pick up all these programs that are installed on the other drives/partitions?

 

[VirtualLarry]

After reformatting, you will need to re-install most of your applications.

 

[F1shF4t]

With steam just backup the games. Otherwise like VirtualLary said you'll need to reinstall.
Also don't bother uninstaling the programs from the other drives, just delete the files or install over them when you have installed the os.
(Its possible sometimes to transfer programs from one os to the other via regitry keys etc, but for most large programs which create lots of stuff in different locations it would be just easier to reinstall)

 

[McRhea]

All right, I figured as much, but just wanted to make sure there wasn't a better way to do this.

Thanks fellas. Backing up all my steam games sure is gonna be fun, lol.

 

[Boobs McGee]

If you have a seperate partition just move all the actual games out of the steam folder into a different folder. That way you can delete everything as suggested above, but then you can just copy the games back over once you reinstall steam. That will save you a whole mess of time instead of letting steam download them all again.

 

[Chapbass]

Yeah, if steam is on another partition, then just format your os, reinstall steam with the install directory the same as it used to be (on the other partition), and then itll just pick up the games automatically.

 

[theAnimal]

Repair install FTW.