How To Move Windows Software To Another Hard Drive Without Breaking Anything

How To Move Windows Software To Another Hard Drive Without Breaking Anything:
Move any Windows program to another hard drive, without breaking the program. If your primary hard drive is full, and what you’ve put on there is software, SymMover is what you’re looking for.
Many people add a second hard drive to their computer when the first one fills up. Moving files – such as music, videos or photos – is a simple matter. Moving software, at least on a Windows system, isn’t. Any attempt to manually move the folder containing the software will almost certainly result in software that no longer works.
SymMover solves this problem by moving the software, then using symbolic links to fool Windows into thinking your software is still located where it should be. And it’s not just for software – you can change the actual location of any folder without Windows noticing, making this a great tool for saving space on your drive.
SymMover only works on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows XP and 8 users are out of luck, at least for now. It also won’t work if your drives aren’t formatted NTFS, but if you’re using Vista or 7 that shouldn’t be a problem.

Warning!

Before I begin – a warning. This software is supposed to simply move things and add a symbolic link, but there’s always a chance something could go wrong when you’re messing around with system files like this. I’d highly recommend not using this for software you no longer have installation disks for, because there’s always a chance you’ll need to re-install something. You’ve been warned.
SymMover worked very well for me in my tests; that’s all I can say. Don’t write comments complaining that you broke something and are angry with me and/or the creators of this software.

Using SymMover

When you start up SymMover you won’t see much of anything, other than the space you currently have left on your two drives or partitions:

To make use of this program you first have to add some applications or programs which you’d like to move. Click the “Add” button and you can get started.

You’ll find a list of programs installed on your computer, or you can manually browse to any folder. Be sure to set your destination as well; by default it will simply move everything to a “SymMover” folder on your “D” drive.
Once you’ve added some folders you can go back to the main window. From here you can start the moving process by clicking the green arrow. As you can see, I’m going to move a few of my biggest pieces of software.

For best results, use Nyan Cat Progress Bar. Otherwise you’ll simply see the usual green progress bar, which is boring and stupid:

When SymMover is done moving your software, you’re done! Open your software to make sure it still works, and feel free to browse to the destination folder if you’re curious about where everything is.

As you can see, my test program (Boxee) is working just as it did before.

Download SymMover

Want to try this out? Click here to download SymMover. Like I said previously, this only works for Windows Vista and 7; XP users are out of luck, as are (currently) people testing the unreleased Windows 8.

Conclusion

There are plenty of ways to save space on your primary hard drive. You can move you media files to a different drive. You could use dupeGuru to find and delete duplicate files. You could use CCleaner and CCEnhancer to remove files you don’t really need. Sometimes that’s not enough, however, so I’m glad I’ve found SymMover.
Did it work well for you? Share your experience in the comments below, or share other tips for reducing the amount of stuff on your primary drive.