External harddrive help?

[JSIMMO]

I've just recently purchased an external harddrive to tranfer my whole computer onto.

I've tried to access the programs I had on my disc drive and they dont load, at all, what do I have to do, edit the registry for them to work or what? If I do, how do I go about it without murdering my machine??

I'm now using a fresh installation of windows vista home premium 32bit. And the harddrive is a Western Digital Elements 1TB harddrive.

[VHG]

You cant just move all your files (including programs) to an external hard disk and it expect it to work.

There are loads of "pointers" inside Windows that will expect the programs to be on "C" and if they are not there it wont understand what has gone wrong so will not work.

There are all sorts of other issues about moving all your files to the external drive (such as hidden files and system files) that make it likely that any attempt to do it will leave you with a wrecked PC (which sounds as though it may have already happened - hence your Windows reinstall).

So basically Windows and all your programs need to be on "C".

PERSONAL files (music, pictures, office files, video files etc) can be moved to an external hard drive but that is all.

You can BACKUP all the files on your hard drive to an external hard drive (so make an image of your hard drive). This is useful in case your hard disk crashes and you can restore from this back up image. But you have to use a special program to do it.

But you cant just move everything to your external hard drive.

[VHG]

One extra thing.

If you have done a freash install of Windows, and you still have all your programs on the external hard drive, there is NOTHING you can do (like update the registry) to get those programs working.

These programs all need to be installed again from scratch (onto the C drive) so they can be registerted with this new install of Windows.

And as a suggestion, it may be best to ask about something BEFORE you do it, than to just do it, and then find you need a Windows reinstall.

[deggers316]

you can make a clone copy with easeus (free) on to any hard drive of your "c" disc but it will format the disk to be copied to first,so losing anything on that
iv'e done this twice when buying bigger hard drives with no problems

[Wak]

As Deggers says, you can CLONE your entire "C" drive on to your external hard drive using Easeus which then enables you to clone the external drive onto another computer or a new hard drive. Cloning takes all the registry data and hidden files with it but there isn't much point doing this for the original C drive as you will already have the RESTORE facility on the C drive, but you could clone the external drive (now containing the original C drive) onto the 1 TB drive if it is a new drive.
Cloning is not the same as copying files/programs across which I believe is what you originally did.
After cloning, the External drive will also contain the Easeus program which is used to clone itself onto the new drive.