Applications not recognised/working after installing new drive

[DublinDude]

Hi all,

I recently purchased a new hard drive. It is working fine and I have my original hard drive still installed. (Now my D: drive)

However, all the applications I installed on previous drive don't seem to work or need to be reinstalled on new drive.

For example, when I navigate to a particular application on my D: drive and double-click to launch it, it either doesn't recognise it or wants to install it again on C: drive.

Is there anything I can do here?

EDIT: Just tried launching a game on Steam and its looking for serial number even though its already fully installed on D: drive!

 

[digibucc]

well it's not fully installed. in order to be using the new one as c you had to install windows to it, which is a new installation.

if you make it boot off your old drive again, everything will work as it did. you can make it do that in the bios.

you can get disk imaging software (like acronis) , and image your old drive and write it to the new one. other than that you cannot use the new one as your C: drive without having to migrate all your info and reinstall your software.

the issue is that the new drive has a new windows install - even though the files are on the old drive they are not INSTALLED into the new windows installation.

 

[DublinDude]

well it's not fully installed. in order to be using the new one as c you had to install windows to it, which is a new installation.

if you make it boot off your old drive again, everything will work as it did. you can make it do that in the bios.

you can get disk imaging software (like acronis) , and image your old drive and write it to the new one. other than that you cannot use the new one as your C: drive without having to migrate all your info and reinstall your software.

the issue is that the new drive has a new windows install - even though the files are on the old drive they are not INSTALLED into the new windows installation.

Thank you for your reply. I thought maybe I could un-install the software from the original drive but none of them are showing when I go into control panel to uninstall software! Which makes sense to me now after what you said.

I guess I could just backup important files and then format the drive and then install the software again on new drive!

 

[digibucc]

that's what i would do. preferences, favorites ,etc can be copied right out of your documents / appdata folder, and steam games just need to be activated again, no re-download.

i do it once every month or two. just copy my entire user folder out reinstall and back again, keeping pretty much all of my settings in different apps.