Reinstall Vista - Will programs on slave drive work?

[qwertyaas]

Is there any way to keep my programs on my slave drive after a Vista reinstall (without imaging the drives). I was told if I run the programs as admin, the registry will automatically update as if I installed the programs on that install.

Will that work or should I just do a clean install of everything? (Would rather not go through reinstalling all my games and such).

 

[dbwillis]

Most programs need to be installed to input the registry settings.

Ive never heard of 'running as admin to install the registry settings', have a link to the Microsoft article?

 

[Zero82z]

The registry will not automatically fill itself in. You can get the programs to work by manually going through the registry and saving all the keys pertaining to those programs, but it's a pain to find them all and chances are it would be easier just to reinstall the programs already.

 

[qwertyaas]

Would using repair on the games (if applicable) work? I remember I did something similar to this a while ago, but can't remember for sure (although doubt it will since there are no registry entries for it at all).

For a game like WoW, it will save so much time as opposed to installing the game and exp, and repatching

 

[Zero82z]

Would using repair on the games (if applicable) work?

No.

 

[Moofasa~]

No.

However in the case of Blizzard games (at least WoW and WarCraft 3), after you run the program it will automatically reconstruct the registry keys if no registry keys are detected (ie: you can back up the warcraft3/WoW folder then run war3.exe on the new installation and everything will work fine).

 

[qwertyaas]

However in the case of Blizzard games (at least WoW and WarCraft 3), after you run the program it will automatically reconstruct the registry keys if no registry keys are detected (ie: you can back up the warcraft3/WoW folder then run war3.exe on the new installation and everything will work fine).

Thanks! I knew I remember there were some games that actually did rebuild the registry if you just copied the game over to another drive.

 

[Headbust]

this would be really nice feature in the next windows, that is to not have to reinstall programs if you need to reinstall windows

 

[qwertyaas]

this would be really nice feature in the next windows, that is to not have to reinstall programs if you need to reinstall windows

Definitely. Especially how games are getting so big, and needing patch after patch. It really becomes a hassle to sit downloading patches all day after installing everything again.

 

[DeaconFrost]

This is why, until Microsoft starts pushing developers to create standalone applications, there is no reason to move your applications to another drive or partition.