Consolidating Drives

[BlueNostromo]

I do not plan on doing this any time soon because I do not have a reason or the money to do so. Regardless, I have a 250GB SSD boot drive with a 500GB storage drive. There are many program files (in the folders "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)) as well as some others I will have pictured. Would there be any way to consolidate these to one drive? Would I have any problem just dragging and dropping these into the boot drive given there is enough space? My OS recognizes the F: drive as part of the operating system, but does not require it to boot.

Was thinking about a Mushkin Reactor 1TB. (Only $230!) BTW don't know why I was so salty this morning

 

[ATMINSIDE]

I would suggest using something like Application Mover unless they're Steam games.
You can move Steam games by doing a backup and restore of them.

Reason being you need to make sure the Registry gets changed properly.

 

[Mpegger]

Symbolic Links can also help. It's what I used to use before Steam had the option to put game installs on a different drive, as well as moving folders in Windows that don't give the option to do so.

 

[BlueNostromo]

I have a back up of both of those drives, could I use that to put everything on one drive?

 

[JrClocker]

When the program installs, it tells windows where the information is via a path. If you did not do what Mpegger referenced, then Windows see the install path as "F:\blaa\blaa". If you just simply movethese files over to "C:\blah\blah", Windows will puke when it tries to load as it expects them on "F" and won't be able to find them.

If they are Steam games, you can easily to as ATMINSIDE says.

Application Mover is a decent program...but I've had it miss a few in the past.

When I want to move something (that's not Steam), I save the data, uninstall the program, and then reinstall in the new location.

Hope this helps!

 

[BlueNostromo]

I understand Windows will puke if I that which is why I wanted help in the first place. Would Windows Backup automatically make the links for me if I told it to restore the files to a single drive?

 

[JrClocker]

Good question, but I don't think so.

At a minimum, you have the registry items that need to be changed.

Additionally, there could be settings files for the application itself. Windows generally does not have knowledge of what is in a settings file...so it would not know to update the settings file on the restore.