What if?

[graldensblud]

Hi

This is all in the "what if" stages.

I'm considering getting a 2nd hard drive for my perfectly ordinary PC. You see, it occurred to me whilst formatting system (stubborn virus) that if I put all my programmes on a different physical drive to the operating system (XP pro), i could freely format the machine to make it clean/unvirused/faster etc, as i am wont to do, without enduring the many hours and hours of reinstalling and personalising key programmes, which of course takes far longer than the windows install itself. I could just unplug the D: drive, format C:, reinstall windows, plug D: back in.

Is this in any way feasible, or would the fact that programmes when installed,reference the registry just cause endless headaches? (it would of course also be clean and new after a reinstall i suppose...)

I don't actually know anyone who uses their 2nd HDD for other than archive storage. Perhaps there's a reason for that! Help/thoughts appreciated.

[I then started thinking that if the 2nd drive were a 74Gb raptor everything important would get nice and fast, but thats a side issue]

 

[StorageJoe]

You would need to reinstall all the software as it would change system files and registry entries.

 

[Slartibartfast]

Yes, a lot of programs write to the registry. So not only would you have to figure that mess out (and good luck...) you would also have to stick everything back in the start menu.

 

[paradoxblue]

u could buy a second hdd. setup everything how u want. clone it to the other hdd then take that drive offline. when u wanna restart pop in the second drive

 

[graldensblud]

Thanks for the sounding board. Might investigate the cloning option, since that only need be a cheap/loud HDD if its mostly never even connected.