Installing crap on second partition

[jacksonwalters]

Is there any way to set Windows 7 to install anything and everything by default into a 'programs' folder on a second partition?

[booman]

wow, what for?
you want a "Windows" folder in Program Files?

[Samuknow]

He wants his programs on a different partition.

[danrok]

Post #4 here might be of some use...
changing some system variables? - Windows 7 Forums

[Áedán]

There are registry entries that control where program files live, and these can be modified. Most applications will honour these, but not all! However, this won't move any existing program files you have across, it will only affect future installations. Information on this can be found here: Microsoft does not support changing the location of the Program Files folder by modifying the ProgramFilesDir registry value. They do tell you how to do it if you wish to.

If you're running 64bit, there may be two paths to change.

One alternative is that instead of using drive letters, you could mount the partition at c:\program files instead. What this does is allow you to specify a path, where all the files are on a different partition. Information on this can be found here: How to create and use NTFS mounted drives in Windows XP and in Windows Server 2003.

Hope this helps!

[Gizmo]

I manually moved the Program Files directory on my XP machine when I first built it, using the registry editing method.

There are a bloody LOT of registry entries to change! Reason being, a lot of applications store information in their 'Program Files' directory by default, but for one reason or another have a modifiable registry entry that contains the path to that data. If you move the application and change the ProgramFilesDir registry value, those applications will still end up looking at the old Program Files entry for at least SOME of their data unless you also change THOSE registry entries.

I also used the same method to move my Documents and Settings directory. Unfortunately, this is not 100% successfull: Windows is pretty determined that the 'D&C' directory will live on the system boot drive. You can move individual user profiles to different drives, but you can't move the Administrator or Default or some other system accounts, and you can't move the 'D&C' directory itself. The reason for this is because when Windows boots, it HAS to have access to the Administrator profile and various other system user profiles. If the drive containing those profiles is not there, the system will die a horrible, grizzly, gruesome, ugly death. The best way to prevent this is to just force those profiles to have to be on the system drive.