Vista - Splitting Vista Installation From Programs?

At the moment I have vista installed on a 70GB hard drive along with all my programs and documents. Is it possible to put vista into a seperate partition from my programs and data without reinstalling anything?

Hello szkoda, and welcome to the vista forums,

Yes this should be possible using built in features of Vista to use pointers to a second hard drive for things such as program files. Am at the early stages of putting together instructions for achieving this and will post in the forums when it has been tested.
The built in personal files folders (documents etc), have this function built in as part of their properties and the location tab.

hope this helps

OK great, could you let me know in this thread when youve posted it?

Hi szkoda,

hopefully I will be putting together a full tutorial on what can and can't be moved to a second drive or partition. but will post back as soon as it's more complete

Hi szkoda,

I think what Nigel is describing is the process of actually having the apps. and data installed on a different partition from Vista, and then pointing Vista to where they are.

I am looking forward to the tutorial too.

However, you already have your programs installed physically along with Vista , and you would need to uninstall and reinstall them for that.

There is another option you might like to try. You could create a separate partition and copy your photos, music, documents etc onto that. Then create shortcuts either to the new drive, or the new folders and place them on the desktop or quick launch. You would need to point your apps. at the new locations of folders they need to access, for example, if you had photo gallery accessing C:\Pictures previously, you would change it D:\Pics or whatever your new pictures folder was called.

Programs you don't use often can be relocated to the new partition - you don't necessarily need to reinstall them - most will run from their .exe files. Copy the program folder to the new drive and uninstall from the first partition. I would be keep programs that come in at startup, or that are used frequently, and particularly security apps. installed on the same partition as Vista.

Hope that helps

SIW2

Hello all,

When you install most programs these days it will have an advanced option that will allow you to set the install location to say D:\programs\new app\ and the majority of the bulk of the program will be on the D: drive but it will often still use the c: drive for its Application data (it's settings etc), what i hope to do is set up a vista junction on the C: drive pointing C:\program files to a location on another drive so that the process is fully automatic to the user. It should be possible to "trick" vista into placing other items that have to be in "fixed" locations. on a second drive or partition

I have the info on how to do this but need to actually try things before I would advise anyone else to try this.

The one folder that may be usefull to re-direct is WINSXS in the windows folder which is 7.5GB on my system and contains various versions of dll files.

Thanks Nigel,

Yes my WINSXS folder is becoming a fair size, too. Look forward to any ideas you come up with.

SIW2