How does installing programs on drives other than the C: affect the OS?

[MaxDSP]

Say Im running Win2K and I install Winamp to a network drive, like drive F: for instance. How much does an installation like that interfere with the operating system drive?

Also, another scenario. At school, I always see people installing P2P programs on their ZIP drives. The problem is that everytime you move to a different PC, you have to reinstall the program.

 

[azkiwi]

maybe I misunderstood your question - in which case consider this a bump.

Lots of folks (me incl.) install all our programs to a different hard drive than the OS. And all of my data to another drive which backs up nightly to another drive. Gives more security against failures of all kinds and makes defragging easier too. None of this is any problem for the OS and presumably faster since more than one drive can be accessing at the same time.

 

[obenton]

Installing onto network drives can be problematic because of accessibility and speed issues.

 

[MaxDSP]

Maybe I need to phrase it another way. Say I have 2 physically separate hard drives, A and B. I install the OS onto A. I then proceed to install programs like Office and Photoshop onto drive B. Now say I took out drive B and plugged it into another machine. Woud the programs still work?

 

[corkyg]

As long as the programs on the #2 drive are properly installed in the OS's in both machines it will not be a problem. That is easily done either with a mobile rack mount or a hot-puggable external HDD on USB 2 or Firewire.

 

[Derango]

Since a lot of programs use the registry to store settings in, just taking a hard drive, plugging it into a computer and trying to run the programs wouldn't work all that well....unless the program was installed on both computers (so that the registry settings would be there)

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Derango
Since a lot of programs use the registry to store settings in, just taking a hard drive, plugging it into a computer and trying to run the programs wouldn't work all that well....unless the program was installed on both computers (so that the registry settings would be there)

Exactly. It won't work (99% of the time).

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: jliechty

Originally posted by: Derango Since a lot of programs use the registry to store settings in, just taking a hard drive, plugging it into a computer and trying to run the programs wouldn't work all that well....unless the program was installed on both computers (so that the registry settings would be there)

Exactly. It won't work (99% of the time).

Exactly what I said - and if it is installed properly on both system OSs using the floating drive, it will be in both registries and will work just about always.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: corky-g

Originally posted by: jliechty

Originally posted by: Derango Since a lot of programs use the registry to store settings in, just taking a hard drive, plugging it into a computer and trying to run the programs wouldn't work all that well....unless the program was installed on both computers (so that the registry settings would be there)

Exactly. It won't work (99% of the time).

Exactly what I said - and if it is installed properly on both system OSs using the floating drive, it will be in both registries and will work just about always.

Not always. For instance, Pegasus Mail, a POP3 e-mail client, stores an .INI file in the same directory as the mail spools, with an absolute path to where those files are in the system. Move the drive/change drive letters, and you are screwed.
Thankfully, the program has a feature, if you re-install it onto C:, you can manually point it to the old mail spools on the other drive, and it will still access them. (I know this all because I had to do this for someone else quite recently.)

Also, W2K stores some sort of drive-letter mapping to physical HDs, not sure how it does it. I ghosted the contents of one drive onto another, moved the HD positions around physically on my IDE bus, and still W2K tried to access files on the old physical drive (creating lots of wierd empty directories in the process). Watch out for that "feature".

 

[robisc]

This subject is one that I have to disagree with some folks as for their partitioning scheme. Personally I have 3 partitons on a Windows machine, I have an OS/programs partition a data and a backup partition. I've never understood why folks would worry with installing applications to a different partiton just for safety's sake, let's say that your primary OS partiton crashed and you had to reinstall the OS, from my experience with todays bloated programs that write a lot of files to the OS drive and registry then you would need to reinstall that program too, so I say why not just put the OS an apps on the same partition?

 

[azkiwi]

Originally posted by: robisc
This subject is one that I have to disagree with some folks as for their partitioning scheme. Personally I have 3 partitons on a Windows machine, I have an OS/programs partition a data and a backup partition. I've never understood why folks would worry with installing applications to a different partiton just for safety's sake, let's say that your primary OS partiton crashed and you had to reinstall the OS, from my experience with todays bloated programs that write a lot of files to the OS drive and registry then you would need to reinstall that program too, so I say why not just put the OS an apps on the same partition?

You know there is a whole page on this - here - there are quite a few pros and cons.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: robisc
This subject is one that I have to disagree with some folks as for their partitioning scheme. Personally I have 3 partitons on a Windows machine, I have an OS/programs partition a data and a backup partition. I've never understood why folks would worry with installing applications to a different partiton just for safety's sake, let's say that your primary OS partiton crashed and you had to reinstall the OS, from my experience with todays bloated programs that write a lot of files to the OS drive and registry then you would need to reinstall that program too, so I say why not just put the OS an apps on the same partition?

That's my opinion as well. I tried the os+app+data partition scheme before, and when you reinstall the OS, you end up having to wipe the applications partition as well, so might as well make them all in one. The only thing that you need to be careful of is that some programs (MS Outlook, for example) store their data files by default on the OS/app partition. Usually that location can be changed, but if you aren't careful you might end up wiping your outlook.pst or some other important file. Just be careful to avoid such mistakes when configuring your programs.