"Reconnecting" programs from a different partition

[dustforged]

I'm about to do a major upgrade on my hardware, pretty much my entire tower except my hard drive (it's fairly new, with plenty of space). I am under the understanding that because I'm changing my motherboard, I need to reformat and reinstall windows, which is fine and I've done it before. Like many, I have a partition for all my windows stuff and a different, much larger partition for most everything else, including many programs (mostly games). So to make things easier I would like to just reformat the windows partition. I have done this before too, but I remember that when I did I had some problems running some programs from the non reformatted partition after the reinstall, and they were predictably not on my Start>All programs menu or the Add/Remove programs list commonly accessed from the Control Panel. So after a lengthy intro, my question is does anyone know a way to get all these programs reacquainted with windows so peace and balance can be restored to the universe without my having to un/reinstall all of my programs (especially those that require a cd key that I may or may not still have possession of)? Is there something I can do before the reformatting to help?

Thanks in advance, you will save me a lot of time and probably some of my favorite older games. Besides that, I'm just curious.

 

[Harvey]

You're right that the cleanest way to set up a new motherboard is with a clean installation of Windows. That means, you'll have to install any of your programs that requires an entry in the registry, which is almost anything other than old command line progs, as well.

I have managed to "install" a few older, simpler programs on some friends' machines without doing a full installation, but only because the old installation program didn't work well with XP. By the time I set up icons on the desktop and in the Start Menu, it would have been more work than it was worth if there were any other option.

The best thing would be to have all your files on an entirely different drive so that, after you install your Windows and your programs are installed, you can simply transfer your files to any location you want and set the various programs to find their files where you want to store them.

I hope that helps.

 

[dustforged]

Is there something I could do with exporting the registry now and importing after windows reinstallation? What about a system restore point?

I know the registry has some information about hardware, but could this be overcome with registry cleaner like CCleaner.

Or am I just an idiot playing with fire?

 

[daveybrat]

Unfortunately, having a separate partition for games only made sense back in the dos days, when the entire game would reside in the application folder. Now, there are shared files sometimes in the windows system folder that the games need and most importantly, there are thousands of registry entries that cannot be saved for each game and app.

So once you format the C: drive, goodbye all applications on your other partition. And there is no way of backing up all that registry information.

Unfortunately you'll have to do a full format just like the rest of us. Yes we all hate reloading all our apps and games, but there just isn't an easier way for now.

 

[dustforged]

Well, I guess that's just another reason to buy games with steam.