hey guys, I have a Dell dimension 4700. It has a 80 gig hard drive. The hard drive is about at 68 gigs. I went and purchased an external Western Digital 320gig hard drive.Can I move all my pc games music programs that i have. I also have software for burning dvd's,cd's ect..I need to remove files off of my 80 gig hard drive. I don't want it to lock up or crash. And if I can transfer the items then will they still be able to be diplayed on my desktop? aLso if this is possible then how do I clean the files off of my 80 gig hard drive once the files are moved to the external320gig hard drive. Some help please. I know a little about computers,so I am not completely in the dark.
All the programs that you installed in your 80gb hard drive are usually installed in the default C:\program files\name of program. The program folder of each program can be moved anywhere you want and they will still work Just go into that folder program files and just moved the program folder you want to the external hard drive. The programs will run fine from the external hard drive. The only thing is you will have to update you desktop icons to point to the new location of the program exe file which will be in the external drive. Once you move the programs you want, just delete the original files in the 80gb hard drive, and empty the recycle bin. DO NOT USE the "add or remove program" tool in the control panel (because that will delete the registry entries from your computer and will prevent the programs on the external drive from working). As long as you don't move any "windows" folders you shouldn't have any crashes.
That's not necessarily true John... the Program Files from the old hard drive still might need registry keys stored on the old hard drive to function properly. You should export your HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software registry keys from the old HD to the one. To do this, run RegEdit from your old HD. Do this BEFORE MOVING OR UNINSTALLING ANY APPLICATIONS. (Start> Run> Type regedit and then OK) Expand My Computer, expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and highlight the Software folder. Now go File> Export> At the bottom of the window make sure "Export Range" is set to "Selected Branch". Save the Registry file somewhere and move it to your new HD. Then you will need to double-click on it from your new HD so it can add the old registry values to your new HD.
OK, I did the registry process. THen I get this message Cannot import G:\matt.reg:Not all data was sucessfully written to the registry. Some keys are open by the system or other processes. What do I do now?
just move your data stuff to to the external besides saving onto cd/dvd disks. leave the programs that have been installed where they are. any uninstalled programs can be copied to external hd besides cd/dvds.
matt1231: That should be alright, I'm assuming you didn't move over all your programs onto your new HD yet or some you don't want anymore? Some software registry keys from your old HD are used by other things like drivers/codecs, renderers, plugins etc... so some necessarily won't work. That should be alright, do the programs you moved to your external HD run fine now?
Yes, I started moving things one by one. It all works fine. I am down to 51 gig on my old hd so that is alot better than almost maxing it out. Thanks guys for all the help. MAtt
